Tom Clarke: I beg to move,
	That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, as follows:
	Most Gracious Sovereign,
	We, Your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in Parliament assembled, beg leave to offer our humble thanks to Your Majesty for the Gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament.
	When I was asked by the Chief Whip to move the Address, I was extremely proud and honoured, not least for my constituency of Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill, and to be seconded by my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Liz Blackman), who, among other issues, has an excellent reputation for bringing autism to the fore.
	Christened Thomas, I have throughout my life been instinctively suspicious of well-meaning gestures, even one such as this, so naturally I pondered, "Why me?" All was revealed when my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, South (Mr. Cunningham), a man of great wisdom and knowledge, met me in the Lobby. The tone of our conversation reminded me of the fact that as boys we both attended St. Mary's school in Coatbridge. In his own inimitable style, he said, "I hear you're moving the Address." "That's right, Jim." "Do you know why you were selected?" "No, Jim." "Do you want to know?" "Yes, Jim." He said, "According to Alex Salmond, you've the safest seat in this House and you will be the only Scottish Labour MP to be re-elected." Responding, I replied, "The right hon. Member for Banff and Buchan claimed Labour would lose the Glenrothes by-election, and we didn't, so we're all still here."
	There are three distinctive areas within my constituency of Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill. Historically, the one common feature that connected all three was the contribution to heavy industry. Ironworks, steelmaking and coal mining were once the main sources of employment. I want to pay tribute to those who worked hard to look after their families, as many of them died far too prematurely because of associated illness and disease, often linked with those heavy industries. A special tribute is due to all the women, who, as a consequence, were widowed and left to raise a family single handed.
	Today, the older heavy industries have almost disappeared, and newer light industries are taking their place. Coatbridge has a new £10 million redevelopment project at the Summerlee heritage park, which graphically illustrates our history and, just as vitally, our potential.
	Chryston embraces communities such as Moodiesburn, Muirhead, Stepps, Auchinloch and Gartcosh. One of the darkest days that that community suffered was 18 September 1959 when an inferno raged deep below in the coal mine. It became known as the Auchengeich disaster, in which 47 men lost their lives. We are approaching the 50th anniversary, and many people still turn out to show their respect each year.
	With the utmost humility and poignancy, I wish to add my father to the endless list of men who died as victims of pneumoconiosis without a penny in compensation. My late mother, Mary Gordon, born in Armagh, was left to raise a large family with nothing like the benefits that are rightly paid to widows and families today. That is why I will be eternally grateful that, under this Labour Government, the largest ever financial compensation—nearly £7.5 billion—was paid out to miners and their families who had been affected by diseases through working in such appalling mining conditions.
	Among the many improvements in my constituency is a large site, formerly the Gartcosh steelworks, which is now well on its way to being redeveloped as part of a multi-million pound regeneration programme. Such investment has laid the foundations for Gartcosh to be completely transformed socially and economically, which is very welcome given the traditions of my industrial constituency.
	Bellshill boy Billy McNeill captained Celtic, the first British team to hold aloft the European cup, in Lisbon. Another proud son of the town was Sir Matt Busby, who became the manager of Manchester United—for the record, the second team from Britain to win the European cup.
	My predecessor, the late and much loved Jimmy Dempsey MP, lived in Bellshill and his wife Jane still closely observes political events here at Westminster. Jimmy was renowned for his tireless work in helping to bring jobs to the county of Lanarkshire. He would marvel at the volume of employment opportunities in the Bellshill area. Between the business park and the food park, there are approximately 8,500 jobs.
	Bellshill also gave birth to one of the finest and most outstanding parliamentarians of our time, Robin Cook.
	I do not wish to claim that I am alone in working hard for my constituents. In my experience, hon. Members of all parties are genuinely committed to their work in Parliament and their communities. For example, it would be remiss of me not to pay tribute to hard-working hon. Members who supported victims of pleural plaques. Tragic sufferers of asbestos-related diseases need a compensation package similar to that paid out to the miners.
	During my time here I have served both as a Back Bencher and on the Front Bench. One particular highlight was the time that I spent working under the leadership of the late John Smith, my neighbouring MP, who was destined to become Prime Minister before his sudden and untimely death. When I was shadow Cabinet spokesperson for disability under Tony Blair, I worked closely with the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague). His Disability Discrimination Act 1995 stands, no matter what else he does, as a considerable achievement. I hope that my praise for him does not damage his future prospects—or, perhaps more importantly, mine.
	It would also be remiss of me not to pay a warm tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), who later served as my Parliamentary Private Secretary and who, in my view, would make an excellent Minister himself. The House also appreciates his hard work as Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee.
	In my time here I have always tried to work closely with members of other parties, including the Liberal Democrats, such as the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr. Kennedy). Just last week I was speaking in a debate at Glasgow university, where he is the distinguished rector, and I can assure him that he is held in the highest esteem. Indeed, more recently, on a flight down here, I overheard that there might be some imminent vacancies on the Lib Dem Front Bench. If he finds himself back there, I wish him well.
	During debates here I often follow my namesake, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke). Occasionally, we also receive each other's mail. Not long ago, I read a postcard from a woman who wrote:
	"Dear Mr. Clarke,
	You are an absolute disgrace. Having betrayed us on Europe, I will never vote for you again."
	I took that as a compliment and I urge the right hon. and learned Gentleman to do the same.
	Since becoming a Member of this House, I have set myself three priorities: first, and most importantly, to represent the interests of my constituents. Secondly, I feel as passionately about supporting disabled peoples' rights today as I did when I helped to steer the Disabled Persons (Services, Consultation and Representation) Act 1986 on to the statute book, and that will never change.
	Thirdly, in the year of the Make Poverty History campaign, and with the unanimous support of the House, I succeeded with another private Member's Bill, which became the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act 2006—incidentally, I acknowledge the role that the then Secretary of State for International Development, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), and his ministerial team played. That is why I welcome the Government's—and especially the Prime Minister's—determination to achieve the millennium development goals. The figure of 0.7 per cent. of gross national income is still our objective for 2013. I have every confidence that the Government will deliver, and I have noted the support of those on the Opposition Front Benches.
	There is much to welcome in the Gracious Speech. The banks' responsibility to consumers, the Bill reforming training and apprenticeships, and ensuring an end to child poverty by 2020 are among the priorities that my constituents will find practical and helpful.
	In this debate on the Gracious Speech, the dominant issue is the fragility of the global economy, but let us not forget that thousands of UK troops, from almost every constituency, are sacrificing themselves in a war against extremism. In the Congo and Darfur, displaced people face a violent non-future. Here, and across the developed world, people face the threat of losing their jobs and homes. People who are in poverty, people with disabilities and the people dying in the third world have to overcome many more hurdles than we face in this global downturn, and we should look to their example for inspiration. I passionately believe that, whatever their circumstances, British people have the character to be creative and confident. Working together, we will, we can and we must succeed. In that positive spirit, I commend the Gracious Speech to the House. 3.11 pm

David Cameron: Let me just make the following point to the Prime Minister, and then I will give way to all the Members who are standing. It is no good the Prime Minister hiding behind the defence of "I didn't know" and "I support the operational independence of the police." People want to know— [Interruption.] People know what I believe; what people want to know is what the Prime Minister believes. He has told us endlessly about the independence of the police; what about the independence of this place and its Members? People want to know whether our democracy, and our right to challenge and to question and oppose, are safe under this Government and this Prime Minister, and I hope that when he speaks he will have the courage to get off the fence and tell us what he believes.

David Cameron: We support the excellent work of our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I would like to pay tribute to the two Royal Marines who were killed in Afghanistan on Thursday, Marine Tony Evans and Marine Georgie Sparks. We should remember once again all those whose names have been read out in this place over the last year, and what they have done to serve our country.
	In Iraq, we support the draw-down of troops as conditions allow, and I am sure that the Prime Minister has learned that the draw-down must take place when appropriate and not according to some pre-announced political timetable.
	On Afghanistan, the British Government will clearly come under pressure to increase troop numbers as President-elect Obama plans a surge in US forces. Does the Prime Minister agree that any proposal for an increase in British forces should be accompanied by an increase in troops from other NATO nations, an increase in helicopters to ensure that they are properly mobile, and an increase in equipment and protection for our troops? I hope he also agrees that we will not succeed in Afghanistan through military means alone. We need better co-ordination of aid, less corruption and better government. I hope that the Prime Minister will give us a realistic assessment of the situation when he speaks.
	The work of our armed forces also reminds us of the threat that we face from global terrorism. We saw it last week with the appalling attacks in Mumbai, and our thoughts are with the friends and families of all those who lost their lives. We should be clear about what the terrorists are trying to do: they are trying to rob India of her rightful place in the global economy, to set one community against another, and to set east against west. We should also be clear that those terrorists will not stop trade and co-operation, and they will not break up the excellent relations that exist between Britain and India. We must never give in to that sort of terror.
	One thing that was promised but that did not appear in the Queen's Speech was the draft floods Bill. The Secretary of State promised it for this Session, and I hope that the Prime Minister will be able to confirm that it will go ahead.
	Of course, there are some things in the Queen's Speech that we welcome, not least because we proposed them. There is the NHS constitution—a Conservative idea. There is the independent exam regulator—I proposed that in 2005. There is a savings scheme with matching contributions—that was in our 2005 manifesto. More security for ports and airports was also in our 2005 manifesto. The Prime Minister likes to accuse me of writing that manifesto; he has now introduced most of it. Welfare reforms and direct elections for police accountability were both in my conference speech last year. The Prime Minister likes to accuse us of having no substance, but without Conservative substance there would be almost nothing of any worth in the Queen's Speech.
	Let me tell the Prime Minister what is wrong with this Queen's Speech. There is no recognition in the Government's programme of how the world has changed. We are moving into an age in which there is no Government money left, so we need public sector reform to get better value for money. We are moving into an age of massive debt, so we need to mend the broken society and reduce the demands on the state. But in the Queen's Speech there is no serious reform, just bureaucratic bungling and technocratic tinkering. It is all about the short-term prospects of the Prime Minister, not the long-term future of the country. It is last year's Queen's Speech from yesterday's Prime Minister.
	There is no change. Let us look at the promises that the Prime Minister made when he said—remember the phrase?—
	"Let the work of change begin."
	Let us examine them. We were told that there would be loads of eco towns, but only one is still alive. He promised zero-carbon homes, but there have been virtually zero of them. There are just 15 in the whole country. He promised 3 million new homes, but house building fell by a quarter last year. What about free nursery education for all two-year-olds? That has been abandoned. More maintenance grants for students were granted last year, collapsed in a complete shambles this year and face massive cuts next year. Then there is the Prime Minister's promise of a new constitutional settlement. We were promised more powers for Parliament to question the Executive. That one ended up down the nick.
	What about the statement of British values? Does anyone remember that? According to Government sources, that will never see the light of day. What about British day? Does anyone remember that one? The question is simple—when will it be? How long does it take to set a date for a new bank holiday? Given that the Prime Minister is about to stand up and cancel happy hour, we need cheering up. When will it be?
	It would not matter if those ideas were all just gimmicks, but some of them really raised people's hopes. Whatever happened to social homebuy? The scheme was launched in a blaze of glory and was by now meant to have helped 10,000 families to buy their home— [ Interruption. ] I know that the Government do not follow these things, but we like to check up on them. It was meant to have helped 10,000 families, but it has helped just 235. With this Prime Minister, it is always about short-term politics and never about long-term change.
	Most of the Bills in the Queen's Speech replace one set of failing quangos with another set of failing quangos. Let us take one measure as an example, the thing that the Prime Minister has banged on about year after year, in Budget after Budget—skills. Seven years ago, the Government set up the Learning and Skills Council. They then created 47 local learning and skills council branches. There were then four reorganisations. In 2006, the 47 branches were replaced by nine regional centres, but with 148 local partnership teams. What was the result? The Learning and Skills Council's own report this year said that "unnecessary duplication abounds" and that one arm does not know what the other is doing.
	What is the Prime Minister doing in this Queen's Speech? He is scrapping the Learning and Skills Council altogether and he is passing responsibility for education and training for 16 to 18-year-olds back where it came from, to local authorities. What a waste of time, money and effort. The most ridiculous thing about it is that instead of just killing off the quango, the Government are introducing three new ones—the SFA, or skills funding agency; the YPLA, or young people's learning agency; and the NAS, or national apprenticeship service. Millions are being spent on redundancies, reorganisation and rebudgeting, and administrative costs are going through the roof. In the middle of all that, the number of people being trained has gone down. That is what has happened.
	The Government have abandoned public sector reform, there is no social reform and the promised change never happened. Labour was on the verge of getting rid of the Prime Minister, but the party now clings to the one thing that it thinks that it has left—the economy. So let us look at the state of the economy after the Prime Minister has been in charge of it for a decade. So far, we have focused on the claims that he has made over the past 10 years and on how hollow they sound today. One of his claims was prudence, when we entered the recession with the largest budget deficit in the industrialised world. Another was stability, when unemployment is rising more quickly than in any other major economy. Another ridiculous claim was that he abolished boom and bust. That was ridiculous because under him we had the most unsustainable debt-fuelled boom followed by one of the biggest busts in our history.
	So much for the claims of the past 10 years—let us now take a look at the claims of the past 10 weeks. They are just as threadbare. He told us that Britain is better prepared for this recession—he says that it is true—but it is now forecast by sources that include his own Treasury that we will have the worst recession in the G7 next year. That is how well prepared we are. He told us that Britain's debt is more sustainable, but just yesterday Britain's credit-worthiness slipped behind that of Portugal, Belgium and even HSBC.
	The other claim of the past 10 weeks is that the whole world is following the Prime Minister's plan for fiscal stimulus. This weekend, the German Finance Minister said— [ Interruption. ] He is following my plan, as Labour Members will find out if they listen. He said:
	"Since I've been dealing with economic stimulus packages, that is, since the end of the 1970s, they've never had the real effect that was hoped for. In the end, the state was just more in debt than before".
	He also said:
	"Just because all the lemmings have chosen the same path, it doesn't automatically make that path the right one".
	One would have thought that the Prime Minister might listen to a fellow socialist, but he is too much of a lemming.

Gordon Brown: I know that the whole House will wish me to start by sending our profound condolences, as the Leader of the Opposition did, to the families and friends of Marine Tony Evans and Marine Georgie Sparks of 42 Commando Royal Marines. They were killed in action in Afghanistan last Thursday. We owe them our gratitude for their service and their sacrifice to our country.
	It is also a noble tradition to remember Members who have served the House and who have died during the year. I am sure that all Members will want to join the Leader of the Opposition in remembering two Members who deserve the title, "House of Commons people." The sad death of Gwyneth Dunwoody last year robbed the House of its longest-ever serving woman MP. First elected in 1966, Gwyneth was the third generation of a family dynasty of political women who have perhaps done more than any other to give voice to women in politics today. She was the granddaughter of two suffragettes, and she was the daughter of one of the first female Ministers. If she challenged the Government, she was always critical of the Opposition. She will be sorely missed from her place in the House—a seat located close to the officials' box— from which, during decades of Transport questions, she was heard to shout "Nonsense" and "Rubbish" to officials, as Members on both Front Benches spoke. On her role as Chairman of the Transport Committee, foolish was the witness who had not prepared fully for an evidence session. Legendary was the loud tapping of her pen if witnesses dared to speak from notes: grown men made weak at the knees. Always formidable, always her own person and fiercely independent, she is already sorely missed. [Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."]
	When during his long and fatal illness, John MacDougall arrived in Westminster for a vital vote last year, he was given a standing ovation by Members who came to meet him. Such was his popularity with fellow MPs. He was an apprentice in the dockyard at Rosyth; an engineer; then in the coal mines; then leader of the council; then convenor and then provost of Fife council—one of the first in Britain, three decades ago, to provide free bus travel for the elderly. His constituency was next door to mine, and he embodied the values and ethos of Fife. I met John only a day before he died. I thanked him for all his endeavours on behalf of the people of Fife. I told him that his achievements were great and would be remembered for many years to come, and he gave me one instruction: to ensure that Glenrothes was safe for the future.
	John's campaigning on behalf of sufferers of asbestosis and mesothelioma, from which he himself suffered, has helped to raise awareness of that terrible illness, and as hon. Members know, the Government are examining how we can provide better support for both them and their families. John never wavered in his understanding that his first job was to serve his constituency, and he will be sorely missed.
	I thank the proposer and seconder of the motion. Few Members have the distinction of having piloted one private Member's Bill through the House; even fewer have the distinction of having piloted two groundbreaking Bills, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr. Clarke) is a member of that elite group, the first Bill giving rights to people with disabilities and the second holding the Government to its overseas targets. Those are formidable achievements of which he and his constituents can justifiably be proud.
	Once, my right hon. Friend spoke at an international conference about international development and worldwide poverty and about the difficulties faced by people suffering in so many countries. So successful was his speech that, either because of a failure of translation or for some other reason, food parcels started to arrive in Scotland for people there.
	More than 25 years ago, I had the pleasure of campaigning for my right hon. Friend when he was first elected to Parliament. I remember that the constituency name then was Coatbridge and Airdrie. I found on the streets that he was known by everyone as a former councillor and provost of the area. His opponent was a young Conservative, who was so keen to make himself popular that he said that, if elected, he would buy a house in Coatbridge and marry someone from Airdrie, or vice versa. Needless to say, my right hon. Friend was returned with a huge majority.
	When, during the last election campaign, I visited the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Liz Blackman), who has spent all her life serving the public as a teacher, a councillor, a deputy council leader and then an MP, I found, as the Leader of the Opposition mentioned, that her most notable opponent was not the Conservative party or the Liberal party, nor even her other opponents representing the Monster Raving Loony party or the Church of the Militant Elvis, but someone well known to the House: Robert Kilroy-Silk. Hon. Members may remember that after defeating Mr. Kilroy-Silk, she was returned to Parliament with an increased majority. As we know, Mr. Kilroy-Silk has found a more appropriate place for his talents: eating insects in the celebrity jungle—although he was the first to be voted off as a result of his behaviour.
	In paying tribute to the outstanding and selfless contribution of all those who have served in our armed forces, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, those who have lost their lives, those who have been wounded, and those who risk their lives daily in the defence of our security and to bring peace and stability to the peoples of those countries, I can confirm to the House that we are looking anew at the Afghanistan policy. The review takes into account the dangers that now exist on the Afghan-Pakistan border. It also takes in the need to complement military action with enhanced protection by helicopters and the new fund for asking other countries to provide helicopters, as well as proper burden sharing, with help to train the Afghan army and police, to strengthen their systems governance and to develop their economy. We have recently increased our forces beyond 8,000, but I repeat that with 41 countries involved, there must be fair burden sharing.

Gordon Brown: I shall make some progress, and then I will come back to the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) and the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack).
	In the legislative programme, as we did in the pre-Budget report, we are setting out the detail of real help for home owners and families, real help for small businesses, real help for jobs, real help for young people and real help for communities not only for the downturn but for the upturn that will follow. Today, we are introducing for the first time legislation to abolish child poverty in our country. We are also introducing legislation that will give for the first time young people who qualify the right to apprenticeships. We are also bringing forward legislation for an NHS constitution that will give rights to patients.

Gordon Brown: We are taking measures to protect exactly the people about whom Shelter is talking. We are providing a new scheme which not only allows mortgage repossessions to be postponed for six months but lets people recapitalise their mortgage, supported by a Government guarantee, if they are in difficulty. That is exactly what Shelter and other organisations want us to do. The hon. Lady should applaud, not criticise us, for our actions.

Evan Harris: When he became Prime Minister, he gave an undertaking that Parliament would be able to scrutinise the Government. Does he, as a parliamentarian, recognise that it is not acceptable for Government Bills to pass through on Report without reaching swathes of grouped amendments which you, Mr. Speaker, have selected for debate, and without debating scores of Government amendments? Will he, as a parliamentarian, undertake to sort that out in this Session?

Nicholas Clegg: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. That involves the much wider issue of the lop-sided nature of the information, power and prerogatives of the Executive, compared with the increasingly feeble powers and prerogatives of the legislature.
	From the point of view of the public, this matter should not simply topple into an arcane, introspective debate about parliamentary privilege—a concept that the public have probably never heard of, and about which they care even less. This is about defending the simple principle that anyone wanting to unearth information about the way in which we are governed by the Government of the day should not live in fear of the anti-terror police arriving on their doorstep. This is not, and should not be, an argument between parliamentarians. It is an argument on behalf of the public to ensure that every citizen has the right to tell the truth about the Government of the day, however much that might embarrass Ministers at the time.
	Before I turn to the Queen's Speech, I should like to ask the Prime Minister certain questions, if I may. He does not want to listen, but it would be helpful if he would do so. He has made some important announcements this afternoon. As ever, with him, those announcements were not even highlighted, signalled or flagged up in the Queen's Speech. They related to the Government's policy on Iraq, on Afghanistan and on repossessions, and I want to ask him three questions.
	On Afghanistan, when the right hon. Gentleman conducts this review, will he accept that any lasting stability or peace can be established or maintained only if there is a regional dimension, so that the powers that encircle Afghanistan—Pakistan, Russia, central Asia, China and Iran as well—must indispensably be included in any lasting settlement? Secondly, the Prime Minister has highlighted the fact that we are effectively on our way out of Iraq. Does he not think that it is time to admit that we need a full public inquiry into the circumstances that led to that fatal decision to invade Iraq in the first place? Finally, on repossession, I welcome much of what the right hon. Gentleman has announced today—but if only he had listened to us three or four months ago when we made precisely the same recommendations. Will he tell me how many households that are falling into arrears will be helped by these new measures? The previous measures covered roughly one in 10 of all households in arrears; how many does he think will be covered by the new measures?
	Today was a very important opportunity. This has been a terrible year for millions of British families who are struggling to make ends meet, struggling to pay this month's mortgage bill and this winter's heating bills, and who are worried about whether they can give their children the sort of Christmas they deserve. People are waiting, anticipating, asking and pleading, "Please help us". The Prime Minister says that he is Winston Churchill and the Business Secretary, never known to be outdone in hyperbole, says that he is not Churchill, but Moses. People therefore have the right to expect something big from the Government—perhaps a tablet of stone to fix their everyday problems—yet all they get is this meagre document, dressed up as a solution. We are facing an unprecedented economic crisis and people need a helping hand, yet most of this Queen's Speech is lifted directly from the Prime Minister's pre-Queen's Speech announcements in May. Has he not noticed that the world has changed—and changed utterly? This non-stop drum beat from the Government is like a sort of legislative "muzak", an irritating hum in the background, of no use or no help to anyone.
	We see from this Queen's Speech that the Government are once again to prove to be hyperactive in areas of public policy where they should back off and inactive in precisely those areas where they should do something. They act where they should not act and they fail to act where they should. How on earth can the Government justify the 26th criminal justice Bill without a single mention in the Queen's Speech or in the subsequent debate on the loyal address of the environment or the climate change crisis, which remains the greatest crisis facing us for generations to come? How on earth could the Prime Minister have unveiled legislation that, if reports are to be believed, will give the police the power to check everyone's identity in this country, so smuggling in the ID card system by the back door, while saying absolutely nothing about reducing fuel bills for those people who cannot pay them at all?

Stuart Bell: It is a pleasure and great honour to be called so early in the debate on the Queen's Speech, and it is also a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg). He described the Queen's Speech as a pantomime. I have now attended some 26 Queen's Speeches and have gone to the other place to follow proceedings, and I have always thought it more a pageant than a pantomime.
	It is clear from this debate and the Queen's Speech that there are difficulties in handling the recession. The Gracious Speech must be set against the background of world economic events; we cannot stop the world and get off. The Government's goal is to steer the country through a financial crisis that has converted itself into an economic crisis, and that may yet become a social crisis the like of which we have not seen since the 1930s and the time of the Jarrow marches. There are various corollaries to that: deflation, unemployment and recession leading to depression. That is why, as is clearly stated in the Gracious Speech, the Government place such emphasis on workers, families and small businesses in order to alleviate any effects of the recession and to prevent it from being deeper or longer lasting than it needs to be. That highlights the importance of a fiscal stimulus linked to a monetary policy, and that is where there is a clear difference between the views and positions of the Government and the Opposition.
	The Leader of the Opposition made a fine speech. I congratulate him on his humour and on the way he conducted himself; in the House of Commons we can congratulate other Members when they make good speeches, like Geoffrey Boycott would always congratulate the bowler who bowled him a good delivery. However, as is clear from today's debate, there is a clear difference between the views of the Leader of the Opposition and Opposition Members and the views of the Government. The Leader of the Opposition today prayed in aid the German Finance Minister and, in the past, he has prayed in aid the German Chancellor. Although Germany has fallen into a recession, along with the other 12 member states of the eurozone, and although it is committed to a fiscal stimulus as well as to monetary policy, the German response has been hesitant and modest—some €12 billion of fresh spending over two years, or roughly 0.25 per cent. of gross domestic product, triggering €50 billion of investment. The German Finance Minister has set his face very clearly against a fiscal policy only; he gave his approval to the idea of a monetary stimulus and, as the Leader of the Opposition mentioned, he discussed events going back to the 1970s. This always reminds me of a line of poetry:
	"And see how dark the backward stream
	A little moment passed so smiling."
	It is not possible in the age we live in to go back over things; we have to go forward.
	The Leader of the Opposition's response to the Gracious Speech made much of the situation in Germany, so it is as well to remember that Germany signed up to the G20 Washington statement calling for a fiscal stimulus, even if its is a modest one, and a fiscal stimulus has been declared as the way forward by the International Monetary Fund, the Governor of the Bank of England, the CBI and the Institute of Directors.
	The Leader of the Opposition said today, as he has done in the past, that he does not necessarily believe in the fiscal stimulus. He does believe in what I would call the single-club economic policy; he believes that tax cuts should be funded from elsewhere in the budget. He referred to that today, putting forward some of his own proposals: freezing council tax; cutting national insurance; creating 3 million jobs; and, again, he referred to his national loan scheme. That is a modest set of propositions when contrasted with the Chancellor's proposals for small and medium-sized enterprises—£1 billion-worth of tax cuts, £2 billion in loan guarantees and £4 billion from the European Investment Bank, all building on monetary policy. That is a positive and proactive approach to the present economic downturn and recession, which, again, places the emphasis on workers and businesses. The Government's approach differs from the Opposition's on that. The Government believe in a strong dose of intervention at this time to see us through the recession and lessen its impact, whereas the Opposition are content with what I would call a minimum approach—lowering interest rates and letting them take the strain.

David Maclean: It is always a pleasure and a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell), who is my esteemed colleague on the House of Commons Commission and the Members Estimate Committee. I do not speak in this House wearing my Commission hat but, with that as background, it may helpful if I comment on a few Bills in the Queen's Speech. I shall begin with the one that proposes to strengthen the role of Parliament, but I too regret that there is no Bill on the civil service, as it has long been Conservative party policy that we should have a Bill to restore the civil service's neutrality and impartiality.
	It is interesting that a Bill to make the police more accountable should be in the Queen's Speech only a few days after the outrage that has concerned everyone in this House. Like nearly all hon. Members, I am appalled at the Home Office's reaction and the police's over-reaction.
	Let us get to the key point. It does not involve Mr. Speaker as, although too many people are focusing on this House as the scapegoat; in fact the House was at the end of the line of action. Instead, we should look at who started this assault on democracy. We were told that the Home Office permanent secretary called in the police, but the Met said today that the police were called in by the Cabinet Office.
	I have served in the Home Office, and have always respected the calibre of the staff there and considered them second to none in government. However, if it was Sir David Normington who called in the police, he really is the guilty party whose judgment is so flawed that he is not fit to retain his position. If it was the Cabinet Office driving the affair forward, the guilty person would be Sir Gus O'Donnell, and he too should explain his actions and consider his position. I leave it to people in this House much more distinguished than I am to argue about how much the Home Secretary or other politicians knew, but the point is that David Normington and Gus O'Donnell knew everything. They thought it right and proper to arrest a Member of Parliament who revealed the truth about the Home Office—a Department described by a former Home Secretary as "not fit for purpose".
	In my 25 years in Parliament, I have never attacked or criticised a civil servant, and I deeply regret that I am now forced to do so for the first time. However, the evidence seems to suggest that Sir David Normington and Sir Gus O'Donnell were the ones who brought in the Metropolitan police's special branch and anti-terrorist squad to track down the leaked Home Office documents. If that is what happened, they are the ones who are not fit for purpose and they should explain themselves rather than hiding behind the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister and other senior members of the Government. Ministers may have their own explaining to do in due course, but we are in danger of losing sight of who initiated this arrest.
	Although I regret that there is no Bill on civil service neutrality in the Queen's Speech, we are promised a Bill on police accountability and I turn now to the Metropolitan police. I was a Police Minister for four years, and it was the greatest and most exciting job in government that I was ever asked to do. I liked it so much that I turned down promotion to something else so that I could stay on as Police Minister. I have always defended the police in this country because I regarded them as the finest in the world. I think that all of us have had our illusions about British policing shattered because of this despicable assault on parliamentary privilege by some officers or a section of the Met.
	Who are the senior officers who responded to Sir David Normington's demand to investigate Home Office leaks? Why did they not tell the Home Office to sort the matter out internally, as they always used to? Of course, the Prime Minister was absolutely right to say today that operational independence is very important for the police, but that also means that they should not act as lackeys of the Home Office or the Cabinet Office when the senior civil servant there picks up the phone and says, "Excuse me, chaps, could you send in your top team to get this politician?" Who thought it right to involve anti-terrorist officers to raid the home and offices of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green)? Where is the sense of judgment or proportionality? Furthermore, have they nothing better to do?
	We are very fortunate that the Government withdrew their proposals to hold people in detention for 42 days without trial. Some of us who were sceptical about that have now seen that some sections of the Metropolitan police cannot be trusted with nine hours of detention, let alone 42 days.

David Maclean: The whole House has heard what the hon. Gentleman has said. I am not expert in that area and would not wish to go down that path, but we will all now wish to examine carefully any police accountability Bill to see what additional safeguards it might require.
	The hon. Gentleman mentions an independent inquiry. The Met has called in the transport police to conduct an independent inquiry. Irrespective of how senior the head of the transport police may be, this is a matter of great constitutional significance. Half a dozen people in the other place may be qualified to rule on the constitutional propriety of parliamentary privilege; some in this House will be qualified to do that, but I am certain that head of the transport police is not capable of conducting a proper independent inquiry into whether the Metropolitan police acted with due care and diligence and proportionality in arresting a Member of Parliament for leaks from the Home Office. It is a farce; it is ridiculous; and it does the Met even more damage.
	Today, I understand that the acting commissioner has made a robust defence of the police. He says that they must be able to act without fear and favour—he is absolutely right—but Members of Parliament must be able to do our duty. Using police officers to interrogate a Member of Parliament for doing his duty is a gross abuse of police powers. I regret that I am saying these words because I have liked the Met for years. I had an old uncle who served in the Met many years ago. I greatly enjoyed being the Minister responsible for the Metropolitan Police in my four years at the Home Office. But until the Met police get their act together and sort themselves out, they are casting a shadow on the neutrality and integrity of the whole British police service that the rest of the police service does not deserve.
	Finally on this matter, I say to my colleagues that, clearly, some decisions were made in the House—we shall find out more about them—that were perhaps not best advised, but I ask colleagues on both sides to call off attacks on the Chair of the House. Such attacks only feed those in the print media, some of whom sit in judgment above Mr. Speaker and have always held a grudge against him. Yes, we must make it clear that we will defend Parliament from all unwarranted assaults on our rights, but we do not defend Parliament by going along with some in the media who wish to bring down Mr. Speaker. It is interesting that some of those in the print media who now profess to want to defend the status of Parliament are among the first who want to rake in our dustbins to find every derogatory item that they can get. So let us turn the spotlight not on those who are at the end of the chain of accountability, but on those who initiated the action in the first place in the Home Office, in the Cabinet Office and in the Metropolitan police, who did not have the sense to do the right thing and tell the Home Office to sort it out itself.

Mike O'Brien: I rise just to clarify for you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, the fact that we do not know whether any of these allegations are true or not. I am merely saying in response to the point made by the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean), a well respected Member who is a former Home Office Minister, that those allegations merit a serious police investigation at least. Whether the incident in relation to the House of Commons was right or not is a matter for others to look at. I merely responded in an intervention to the point that he was making. I took the view that his making that point and attacking the police was a matter of great seriousness, considering his experience. We do not know whether any of these allegations are true or not, but they are serious and it is right that the police should investigate them.

Keith Vaz: It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean). I pay tribute to him. Despite his disability, he contributes fully to the work of this House. He gave a typically passionate and very fair speech highlighting issues that naturally concern Parliament at the moment, and he did so in a way that we can all respect. He was right, in particular, to praise the Speaker for the way in which he conducted himself. The Speaker was absolutely right not to start giving press conferences because of the circumstances that have arisen since last Thursday. He was right to come to the House to address Members first and foremost about this issue. There are no leaks from the Speaker's Office, so nobody was aware of what he was going to say from the Chair, but I was as surprised as probably every other Member of this House to hear that a Member's offices were searched without a warrant and with the consent of a third party.
	The Speaker was right to set up the inquiry that we will debate on Monday, when we will have the opportunity to discuss some of the issues that were raised by the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien) and, to a lesser extent, by the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border. That is the right time for everyone to have an opportunity to air their views on this very important issue. I look forward to the debate. I hope that we will be able to set up a Committee that reflects the House and is able to do what Members want it to do, which is carefully to consider all the circumstances of this case. After all, we are setting up an inquiry into an event that occurred not several months or years ago but last Thursday, so it should be very fresh in the minds of everyone involved.
	If the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border is right—I am sure that he is, judging from what has been said in the newspapers—this concerns a lot of very senior members of the Metropolitan police and of the civil service. I have spoken to the Home Secretary, who is yet to make a statement on the matter; I gather that she will do so tomorrow after business questions, although it has not been confirmed by the Annunciator. That will be her opportunity to put on the record what she knew about the circumstances surrounding the arrest of the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green). In my conversations with her, she has been very clear that she knew nothing. However, let us hear it not from me or the media but from her when she makes her statement tomorrow and, if she participates, in the debate next week. Let us keep those discussions for that debate while registering, as did the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border with the passion that he displayed, our grave concern as parliamentarians as to precisely what happened last week. I hope that we get an explanation from all those who were responsible. As for Officers of the House, for whom we have very high regard, I am sure that the inquiry set up by the Speaker will take evidence from them.
	When this story broke last week, members of the Home Affairs Committee were keen that we should investigate all or part of the circumstances. We will discuss the matter on Tuesday, when members will for the first time have an opportunity to discuss the events of last week. If we decide to move forward on this issue, that will be a further opportunity to do as the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border asked, which is to examine very carefully what the police have done. It affects not only Members of this House but every citizen of this country if they are allowed to go into the house or office of a third party without a warrant but with the consent of a third person. That will create a lot of problems. For example, what if someone is out on a particular day when the police want to search their property, and their landlord happens to be there? If they get his consent, is that enough in law?

Andrew Stunell: The right hon. Gentleman makes a serious and important point. Many of us were astonished by what we heard from the Speaker earlier. The right hon. Gentleman has a legal background. In his opinion, before what we heard this afternoon, would it have been right for a landlord to be able to give consent in such a matter?

Keith Vaz: My hon. Friend is right; there are concerns. It has been put to me that holding such elections might mean that those on the far right will get on to the committees and therefore control police forces. However, in my view, the people will get what they vote for. There can be sufficient safeguards to ensure that such bodies represent the views of the public. Therefore, I support in principle what the Government propose. We need to deal with the issue by raising the profile of police committees. That will promote a better understanding of what such committees do, enabling people to call them to account in a way that was perhaps not possible previously. So, with the caveat about low turnouts that my hon. Friend mentioned, I think that people should know who runs our local police forces.
	I welcome the Government's proposals on alcohol sales. The Select Committee on Home Affairs produced a major report, entitled "Policing in the 21st Century", in which we made a number of recommendations about police time. We felt that too much police time was being spent on alcohol-related crime. One in every two crimes in this country is in some way alcohol related. We felt that the real culprits were the supermarkets, by offering two cans of beer or lager or two bottles of spirits for the price of one and by reducing prices so much. That meant that it was easy for people to get pre-loaded before going out on a Saturday night. They then went out in our towns and cities, bought beer in pubs and caused even more disorder.
	I am not making an attack on the alcohol industry, but it must be more responsible. If the industry is more responsible, a lot of the time that the police currently spend dealing with alcohol-related crime will be saved. If hon. Members go to any custody suite on a Saturday night, they will find it full of people who are drunk and who have committed violent offences or public order offences. That occupies a huge amount of the police's time. That is why it is so important not just to deal with what is happening in our supermarkets, but to send out a message to those running our clubs who offer happy hours, free drinks or two drinks for the price of one—anything to get people totally smashed, so that they do not know what they are doing. What we have heard today is a good sign that the Government are prepared to listen.
	There is a commitment in the policing and crime reduction Bill to cut down even further on police paperwork. The Government's appointment of Jan Berry as the new paperwork tsar—she has not taken up her appointment yet—is a very good choice indeed, as she proved to be a very successful president of the Police Federation. As someone who has so recently served with the police at the level at which we as parliamentarians should deal with them—we need to deal not just with chief constables, but with custody sergeants and officers on the beat—Jan Berry will know where the red tape lies. When she makes her recommendations, which I hope will be in line with what Sir Ronnie Flanagan said in his report, I hope that the Government will slash that red tape, ensuring that what needs to be recorded can be recorded and that whatever is unnecessary is left to one side.
	That is why we on the Committee called firmly for every police officer in the country to be given a personal computer. If they each had a blackberry or personal computer they would be able to record what was happening at the scene of the crime, rather than inviting people to come back later. I do not know whether the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border considered such a proposal when he was the Minister with responsibility for policing—I am not suggesting that computers had not been invented then—but the technology has advanced much since, so let us use it.

John Redwood: I remind the House that I am a company director, and that I have declared my interests on the register.
	I echo the words of the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) about legislation often not being the answer to the pressing problems that confront the nation. Perhaps I should begin with a rare word of praise for the Government: the good thing about this Queen's Speech is that there is not too much legislation in it. I make two pleas, however. First, may we please have the time to debate, at length and seriously, the proposed legislation in it, in order to do it justice? If one legislates in haste, one repents at leisure and has to legislate again and again, as we have seen.
	Secondly, may we also have more time in which to hold the Executive to account? What Ministers do when they spend money and when they lead or mislead their civil service teams, or do not lead them at all, is crucial work. Their implementation of programmes and their day-to-day work of judging cases and hearing representations is also crucial work. As a parliamentarian who would like the opportunity to have more sittings here that we could attend, I feel that we could profitably spend our time probing and discussing more of those matters. Sensible Ministers would welcome that scrutiny. As a Minister, I often found it good to have to explain to the House what I was doing. It made one marshall one's case and realise where one needed to raise one's game. Colleagues on both sides of the House made helpful points, sometimes in anger or desperation and sometimes as friends, and one would have been a fool not to take such points on board and to understand what the House was doing.
	I want to speak mainly about the leading item in the Queen's Speech, which is reflected in some Treasury legislation: the need to create financial stability. I think that is the Government's phrase to mean that we need better economic policy so that living standards can start to rise again instead of falling, and so that we can do better by our constituents who face serious trouble. We see factory closure after factory closure and people going on to short-time working. Many people face having employment for only three or four days a week, some people are facing extended factory closures over Christmas and the new year and some people are facing redundancy.
	All our living standards have been chopped brutally by the 25 per cent. fall in the value of sterling of the past four months. Most people's living standards have fallen in the past year because wages have risen less quickly than prices. Living standards are also falling because although the oil price has come down a long way in dollar terms, it has not come down so far in sterling terms because of the weakness of the pound. It certainly has not come down when one faces the gas or electricity bill at home. Practically everyone in the country, save those who have managed to get an extra job on better pay, is experiencing a severe squeeze on living standards.
	When I made a non-party political point to the Prime Minister during the course of his remarks on the Gracious Speech, which was designed as a helpful suggestion to him to tackle the biggest problem that confronts us today—the lack of credit and money flowing through the banking system—I was treated to the usual, foolish political put-down, which was not even accurate. Apparently, the Prime Minister has nothing better to do with his time than to consider the latest offerings on my website. I am greatly flattered by this, and perhaps that shows his true sense of priority, but would he and his acolytes please read it carefully, because what it said was that markets and Government policy are forcing living standards down. That is what I have just told the House, but I have done so at greater length on the website. That is not what I want or propose or think a good idea. I have gone hoarse and have written a lot on the website in the past two years making sensible, serious proposals to try to avoid that calamity and to prevent living standards from falling.
	I deeply resent the way in which time and time again I am told personally, and the Conservative party told generally, that we in some way welcome a recession, that we want to do nothing about a recession, that we accept a recession, that we think a recession is good enough and somehow we like recessions. I loathe recessions; I have seen too many. Yes, they have occurred when different parties have been in office, but they have all been because major policy mistakes have been made. Every one of them has occurred in ways that could have been abated or ameliorated if different policy action had been taken. That is why I have spent the past two years trying to persuade the Government that they needed to take different action to avoid recession or, now that we are deep in it, to get out of it more quickly.

John Redwood: I welcome intergovernmental action of any kind that will address the banking crisis that runs across Europe and the United States of America. I do not take the hon. Gentleman's bait. He well knows that I think that a lot of money is wasted in the European Union, and that I should like it to have a much smaller budget and much less power. However, that is not the point of this debate. We are discussing the very big crisis that confronts a range of economies in the world.
	Britain happens to have one of the worst and most persistent examples of that crisis. We went into it quite early, with the collapse of Northern Rock, and we are now deep in it in a way that is not mirrored in China, Japan or Germany. Those countries are rather stronger when it comes to their balance of payments and financial position. Our position is closer to that of the United States of America, where similar policy errors were made to those that were made here.
	Let us be under no delusion. We did not inherit this problem from the United States of America; we do not have it because something went wrong there. Our policy makers and authorities, using their powers, made similar mistakes to the American mistakes. They should have known better, and they should listen to those of us who can give some explanation as to what went wrong. They should listen to those of us who care so much about our country that we offer them good advice to get out of the situation.
	This is a big crisis, and it is not something to play party politics with. I agree with that proposition, which some have advanced from time to time. Everyone knows that I like a good party political scrap, and that I am not afraid of a good argument, but on this occasion, the magnitude of the crisis and the way in which action has been ineffective so far should be of grave concern to us all. We should listen a little more carefully and think together a little more about how to get out of the situation.
	Let us consider some of the mistakes that have been made. In August 2007, it was obvious to me, as a commentator, and to many people in the City, that the money markets were drying out, that the Bank of England was not supplying enough cash and that there was going to be a banking catastrophe. We warned the Bank and told it to supply more cash, but it failed to do so. We had lectures from the Governor and the Chancellor that it served the banks right, but shortly after those lectures, the run on Northern Rock began. Shortly after that, I am pleased to say, they reversed their policy and agreed that they had to do something and to put money in. Had the Government put in the amount of money in August that they had put in by the end of the year, Northern Rock would not have gone down. It was a totally unnecessary casualty, as a result of obstinacy, foolishness and the inability of the authorities to understand the state of the markets.
	In my new-year message, and in other speeches, comments and articles that I wrote at the turn of the year, I told the Government that interest rates were far too high and that, because they were keeping them so high, we were going to have a very nasty and deep recession in a year's time. I said that if action had been taken to slash interest rates at that time—I suggested halving them, and that has now just about been done, nine months too late—some of the severity of the downturn could have been avoided. The Government decided, however, that they did not want to do that. They now have to answer to the House and tell us why they refused that well-intentioned advice, and why they could not see for themselves that interest rates were far too high and doing enormous damage, and that this was drying up credit in a way that was going to hit the jobs of their constituents as well as ours, in a way that meant that a lot of businesses were going to run out of cash and in a way that was bound to bring things down.
	The Government have taken several famous lines on the recession. First, they have told us that they are on the side of everyone at this time. Well, I would hope that they are. We are all on the side of the people who are about to suffer; that is not something that creates a party political divide in this country. We are elected here to serve people, and I think that we all come here because we have a passion about the people we represent, and because we want them to have a better standard of life and better opportunities in life. That is not something that divides the parties, so it is quite wrong of the Government to go round suggesting that it is only they who are on the side of the people.
	The Government, unlike us, are in a very privileged position. We can suggest, propose and argue about what we think should be done to show that we are on people's side, but the Government can actually do these things. When they threw the challenge across to my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron)—who was in extremely good voice today—to name five things that he would do to help people during this very nasty recession, he reeled off five extremely sensible proposals that he and others on our Front Bench have been arguing for. He obviously took the wind out of the sails of that foolish attack.
	The Government should stop playing trivial politics with this issue, and see that the loyal Opposition are on the side of the people as well, and that we have some proposals that the Government have not yet adopted and which could help a bit. They need to understand that what the people want more than anything else is not help when they have a repossession crisis, when they have lost their job or when they cannot afford to pay the gas bill, but to see the Government following an economic policy that will get us out of this situation. They want the Government to offer some real hope to show that they have got on top of the banking crisis.
	In its early stages, the Gracious Speech referred to legislation for the banks. I have no objection to the Government wishing to put the banking code into legislation, and I understand that the banks have no objection either. The timing of the proposal is quite bizarre, however, because the Government are going to be legislating on banking conduct at precisely the time when a big chunk of the banking sector is coming under their direct control as a nationalised industry. Perhaps the Government do not trust themselves. Perhaps they suddenly see the need to have lots of banking regulation codified in statute because they are going to be the shareholder representatives, as well as choosing and getting rid of the directors and otherwise exercising some sort of control.
	This brings us to an interesting dilemma that the Government now face, and which they need to resolve. Again, it would be helpful if we could have some intelligent dialogue on this matter, rather than silly yah-boo politics. Here is the dilemma. The banks were called in on one famous weekend and told that they did not have enough capital for their existing amount of lending, and that they had to raise large sums of capital very quickly to satisfy the Government and the regulator, who could then say that the banks were secure and safe. That was a rather odd thing to do in the middle of a very bad credit crunch. It would have been very good to have done it three years ago, before the credit explosion really got under way, because it would have taken some of the pressure out of the system and moderated banking conduct. It would also have been sensible to have done it in private, and not to have leaked it, so that the banks could have had a chance to raise the money from private sources without share prices being pushed against them by untimely and worrying leaks about how strong the banks really were.
	If the Government are serious that this is the right time to demand so much more capital for the existing amount of lending, they have to understand that the banks are going to lend less. There are two ways in which banks can meet the new capital requirements. One is to raise very large sums of money, and they have done that a bit, to the extent that they and the Government think that they can. The other way is to lend less, which will result in the ratio improving—the ratio compares the lending with the amount of capital—and this is primarily why the banks are lending less. They have been told, by the Government's regulator, that they need to lend less, relative to the amount of capital that they have.
	At the same time, however, the Government are saying that, now that the banks are coming under public ownership, it is terribly important that they should lend more. Are the Government going to adjust the capital ratio? Are they going to provide even more shareholder capital from the taxpayer? Or do they not understand that their statements are pointing in opposite directions and are contradictory? We need a better explanation from the Government of what they really expect from the banks. Do they want them to be super-prudent, now that they realise how imprudent the regulatory regime, the monetary regime—and, yes, banking conduct—were in the run-up to the credit crisis? Or are they now saying that they have probably overdone it, and they need the banks to lend more? If that is the case, they need to look again at the ratios and consider what they are going to do.
	Of course, no bank of any major scale must be allowed to go down, and I am pleased that the Government understand that. They normally suggest that people like me would like to see that happen, but of course I would not. I have gone blue in the face trying to explain why banks need to be supported, and that they need to be supported in the right way. I think that they need to be supported by an intelligent central bank that will lend them short-term funds when they need them, and by an intelligent regulator privately telling them how much extra capital they need to raise and giving them the chance to raise that capital, either by selling assets, cutting costs and generating more profit, or by going to the market, if that option is open to them. There are many ways in which banks can improve and increase their strength and their capital base, but they were not given the chance to do that because of the damaging leaks that occurred over that fateful weekend, when they were called in by the Government and the regulator.
	The subject of leaks is, of course, extremely topical, and I find it odd that such an asymmetric approach is being taken to the matter. A high-level inquiry is taking place into a series of leaks from the Home Office. There will be plenty of opportunity to debate that matter, and I do not wish to detain the House by talking about it now. We need to know more before we can have an informed debate. I find it odd, however, that the same level of interest was not shown in the leaks about banking share capital, which were highly price sensitive and market sensitive, and which got out through a well-known conduit when what should have been secret talks were taking place at the Treasury. That had a big impact on the handling of the banking crisis in Britain. It speeded up the decision making, which possibly led to bad decisions being made, and, for some banks, it ruled out going to the market in the normal way or generating profit in the normal way to meet the targets. The leaks will prove extremely damaging to the taxpayer, and the information was highly price sensitive. It is surprising that no one is taking a great deal of interest in those leaks.
	The other day, we heard a statement that was meant to be the pre-Budget report. The pre-Budget report is quite rightly normally delivered as a statement, in which the Government revise their economic forecasts and give some background to the real Budget. On this occasion, however, the statement was not a pre-Budget report at all; it was a Budget. In fact, it was the biggest Budget that I have ever sat through in the House of Commons. It moved more money—in absolute terms, and as a proportion of the economy—than I have ever seen a Chancellor of the Exchequer propose to move. It was vast. It was a Budget that divided the House on party lines. The Conservatives rightly said that it involved the least sensible tax cut that could possibly be introduced, which would not have the desired effect. We also pointed out that the borrowing figures were so preposterously large that the Government would be running much too great a risk. The Government, however, believe that that tax cut and that amount of extra borrowing are the right way to handle the recession.
	That was a perfectly good disagreement that needed to be exposed. It was worth a decent debate. However, we got a debate only thanks to the Speaker and only after a lot of huffing and puffing. A Government who come to the House in the person of the Prime Minister to say that they believe in parliamentary democracy should automatically have tabled two or three days to debate that Budget. The Prime Minister should have been proud of it, for heaven's sake. If he really believes in his case, if he thinks that he is right to gamble with so much borrowed money, and if he thinks that an immediate VAT reduction is what is needed to get everyone feeling happy and spending again, and to open the factories and stop the job losses, he has every entitlement to hold that view and to come and tell us about it. Surely he must be proud of it. I think that proposal is completely wrong; I wish it were not: if there were a quick, easy fix and if I thought that taking 2.5 per cent. off VAT would suddenly turn the economy around, I would be encouraging my colleagues on the Conservative Benches—whether or not they agreed with me—to say, "Yes, this is exactly what we should be doing". Unfortunately, I do not think there is a prayer of it working. That is why it deserved a proper parliamentary debate.
	That brings me to the concluding part of my remarks, which is about democracy itself. On this day of all days, we should be reminded of the mighty battles our predecessors fought so that this place could stand up for the people against an over-mighty Executive. Now the form of the ceremony handles the King or Queen as the possible aggressor: that was true 300 to 400 years ago, but it is not true today in an era of a wonderful monarch, who is a democratic one and does not interfere in the political process. Today, the power is on the Treasury Bench; today, the power is in ministerial offices; today, the power is there in the form of Ministers who will not tell us what is going on, who will not answer to this House, who will not answer questions and who will not hold debates on the things that really matter.
	That is why Opposition Members—I think Liberal Democrats as well as Conservatives—are united in believing that the Government have to wake up and listen to those who say that we need a stronger democracy in this Parliament and that we will have better government if it is more accountable government. We will have better government if the Government respect the traditions of this place; we will have better government if Ministers try to answer questions instead of playing silly politics all the time and refusing to answer. It would not have hurt the Prime Minister to have treated my intervention seriously and answered my question about the £487 billion that he is spending on the banks and the banking sector. It is a colossal sum of money; I, of course, wish him well with it; I agree with all the £37 billion of it—but it is not working and it needs to be reconsidered. The Prime Minister needs to re-examine the package to get it working quickly for all our sakes; otherwise, we are simply going to have more factory closures, more job losses, more office closures throughout this country's constituencies.
	If the Prime Minister cannot see that that is how he should conduct himself, it is going to be very difficult for him to make the difficult and important decisions he needs to make to start to get us out of this crisis. It is regrettable if he does not understand that most of the information handled in Government offices is not private information for Ministers to hoard and release to their favourite journalists when they choose, but public information that Ministers have a duty to release in due time and in the proper way to this House of Commons first. The privilege of belonging to this House should be that we get the information first and that we cross-examine the Government first. Why do we need that privilege? Because that is the way we do our job for our constituents. They expect to see Government policy and information tested in the furnace of the House of Commons first, not given to preferred journalists on the side and spun in favourable ways that do not allow the alternative case to be made.
	Our democracy is at risk. We have gone from having twice-a-week opportunities to cross-examine the Prime Minister to having only one opportunity. We were told, "All will be fine, as you are going to get half an hour instead of a quarter of an hour", but that matters very much. It means that the Opposition have a chance of making the agenda only one day a week instead of the two days that we used to have with two 15-minute sessions. We have gone from a system under which most of the time most parliamentary questions got sensible answers in response to the question asked to a position today when most of written parliamentary questions I table get absolutely no answer at all. I am referred to a website or I am told that I have put the wrong question, that I have no right to ask it or that the issue I raised relates to a Government-owned bank or a quango and the Minister cannot comment on it. It is pathetic, Madam Deputy Speaker. The quality of answers to written questions is very low and we cannot have an informed public debate if the Government will not answer those written questions.
	When it comes to oral questions, it is a remarkable occasion if a Minister actually knows the answer and shares it with the House. We have two sorts of Ministers: very clever ones who know the answer and will not give it away because they find it so embarrassing, and not-so-clever ones who do not even know the answer that they must not give away. It is high time that we saw some Ministers on the Treasury Bench who know their subject well enough and have enough confidence in their case to tell us what the facts are, put the spin they want to put on it and try to satisfy the more moderate-minded people on the Opposition Benches. There are some and they would be satisfied with that; others would still disagree, but do so over something that mattered and based on proper information.
	When I was a Minister, before making major statements or announcements, I used to allow my shadow Minister access to civil servants because I wanted him to know quite a lot of what I knew so that we would not have a row or argument about the facts—the facts would be in common so we could have a debate about what the public wanted to hear, namely what interpretation was placed on those facts and what action had been decided on as a result of them. All too little of that happens nowadays. That is why people outside are frustrated with this place; that is why people do not think it is working as it should be; that is why people feel that all the spin—that the Government are on the people's side and the Opposition do not have a clue—is not actually working. People are hurting out there; they are losing their jobs; their living standards are falling; they are under pressure. It need not be like that: the Government should listen and they should, above all, become democratic.

Peter Bottomley: On the night that the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) was elected, Labour lost a mining constituency in the midlands because almost every miner there hated the then Labour Government for the things that they had been doing. From his election to this House to the 1979 election there was industrial unrest, with people fighting the police in the streets; life was not the cosy little life that we are led to believe we have under Labour.
	Many in this House think it will be up to the Conservatives, when we come to power, to put right many of the things that have gone wrong under the Labour Governments. Not everything that they have tried to do is wrong, not everything that they have done is wrong and not everything that they propose in this Queen's Speech is wrong, but the idea that on the red side it all goes well and on the blue side it is all wrong is a total misreading of things. Someone examining the condition of people's lives between 1979 and 1997, especially in the five years after 1992, when the years of continuous growth started, could look at the record and say that there was good to be said about both sides and things that each party could have done better.
	I want to turn to the pressing problem of what will face our constituents in business and in their personal lives during the next year or so, and perhaps even after that. Even when we start to come out of the recession, many in the churn will lose their jobs and will face insecurity where they thought they had security. I shall not spend my time discussing the changes in the pension arrangements that the former Chancellor, now the Prime Minister, brought into effect, because there are other times to discuss those.
	I wish to discuss two examples in the world of business. We have heard a lot of talk about banking, in terms of both the Bill that is to be introduced and the Government's involvement in the banking industry during the past few months. Let us pretend that I am in partnership in a good business where my partner and I work hard, produce a stream of revenue and have been paying back the bank loans for our premises. Let us suppose that we have done those premises up and, by doing so, we have provided building work and helped the economy to move around. Let us suppose that my partner wants to retire and that I made an application to a bank less than a year ago, telling it that buying out my partner would cost a certain sum and asking whether we could negotiate a loan. Let us suppose that the bank said yes in principle, but when I wanted the money six months later, because I plan in advance, the bank just flatly said no. I pursue it, but the bank sends another letter saying that things have changed.
	Someone in such a situation was told that
	"there has been a dramatic and unforeseeable change in the financial markets and this has changed the Bank's lending criteria. Regrettably we are no longer in a position to consider your request."
	If one of the major banks in this country says that it is not prepared to consider a request from someone in a business that has a good future, a good past and a good present, what chances do businesses that are less likely to put forward such a good, bankable case have? The person involved in the case I mention was also told that they could complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service if the bank had not given them satisfaction. No one wants to go to the Financial Ombudsman Service for that; they want to have banking arrangements in this country which mean they do not just get sent a letter.
	The person involved in this case wrote to me saying:
	"I had a meeting with another bank manager today, who stated that the government is asking banks to lend at last year's volume...how are the Government policing this? I still think that as a small business if I am not helped, who will be? Due to the predicament we are in at present we are doing everything to rein in spending, both as a business and at home."
	That is the only other way the money could be found. The letter continued:
	"If this is the general case for all small businesses how is that going to help the economy?".
	I invite the major banks that wish to consider an application in this instance to let me know, and I shall pass on the details to the people who are really experienced in this area.
	I turn to another, larger example. Let us consider a business where there was a management buyout in 2002. Let us suppose that I and my fellow shareholders borrowed £1.4 million and that over the past six years we have not only paid back as we said we would, but we have paid back the loan notes in half the time that we originally agreed. In such a situation, we would not only have been meeting our obligations month by month, but we would have been doing better than that. Let us suppose we face the problem of losing a month's cash flow because of the Government-imposed and Parliament-imposed regulation and we subsequently decide to expand our premises and take out another loan for that. Let us suppose that we make every single payment on time, be it for the management buyout loan, the regulatory changes loan, the loan notes loan, the moving loan or the computer equipment loan.
	Let us suppose that there is no problem, but the bank then changes its approach and for several months this year it stalls and on the day of the news of the banking crisis, the account manager says he is leaving and the credit department says no to a request of ours. Let us suppose that when the business tracks down the replacement, they say that their predecessor never even made a request—presumably, because they had been told by people higher up that there was no point in their doing so—and there was no record of our dealing with him. Let us suppose the business resubmits the request and is messed about for a few more weeks, and that when it subsequently makes contact a director of the bank tells the business he is sorry for what has gone before but the case is going through the formal complaints procedure again and the request would be expedited. Let us suppose that that was four weeks ago, and when contact was made again very recently the bank said that it had no money as the funding from the Government was conditional upon something that was not happening until the new year.
	I know of a business in such a situation, and it told me that
	"the account manager contacted us to say that not only was our request...turned down, our secondary request to restructure our existing loans was also rejected and as a sting in the tail our accounts were being passed to their 'intensive care' department."
	That has happened to a business that wants to continue expanding. We know what the result will be: the business will have to reconsider the number of staff that it employs and whether to spend money on the refurbishment—a business that is profitable and doing well. That situation has happened several times in my constituency, and that can be multiplied by 630-odd constituencies around the country. Until that sort of thing stops happening, and until banks start saying that they want to take on bankable propositions, the liquidity squeeze will continue, and it will do as much to put people out of work as any major restructuring of the economy.
	The hon. Member for Great Grimsby was right to say that many industrial changes have taken place during his time in Parliament. One has been the taking of a lot of infrastructure spending out of the hands of the Government. For example, the privatisation of British Telecom led to a massive investment in the telecoms infrastructure and to competitors coming in. The privatisation of ports led to this country's ports being resuscitated; that was the case not only for the non-public ports, but for the former public ports. The same thing happened to British Rail's hotels, to the British Airports Authority and to British Airways itself. Leaving people free to do their own investment can lead to greater infrastructure spending and the benefits that we want. Deregulation that takes the hand of central Government away can do a lot of good.
	This is the sort of speech that the hon. Gentleman would say did not have a theme, and he would be right. Let me turn to one little bit of good that we can do immediately in this Chamber. We could consider the welfare of the officials—the civil servants—who are stuck for hours in the officials' Box. I do not think this has been considered by Members, because we have not tried sitting there for four hours during a debate with no knee room and no glass of water—they have nothing at all. The House authorities should consider whether they can do something to help those in the Boxes. We should consider whether they could have some more knee room and whether they could have a glass of water to keep them going while they listen to us.
	I turn from that subject to the delicate issues relating to what has been referred to by somebody as the case of the Ashford One. I am talking about what happened when the police made a request to come to a Member's office. My view is that the House made a mistake—I think that the other place may make the same mistake—of implementing the Tebbit report, which led to the Serjeant at Arms being brigaded not under the Clerk as before, but under the No. 2 Clerk. Most of the time, to most of us, the Serjeant at Arms was independent, having been appointed by the Queen. The new arrangement provides a much bigger gap between the exercise of authority and judgment.
	If I may refer to something that I have read in the papers, Black Rod was reported to have had a stand-off with No. 10 about the Queen Mother's funeral arrangements. I would like to think that Black Rod and the Serjeant at Arms—whoever holds those posts and at whatever grade—have the authority to be able to say, "No, that isn't right" or "You should think about that again." That requires playing a role rather greater than that of facilities manager. The role of the Serjeant at Arms is important for this House, as is that of Black Rod in the other place.
	I do not say things in private that I would not say in public, and I have not said in either a word against Mr. Speaker during the years that he has been in the Chair. None of us is capable of getting everything right, but he is an honourable person who does a good job, and we can be proud of the way he does it. It may be different from how others might do it, but we should not focus our attention on the occupant of the Chair. Instead, we should have a system whereby everyone presumes—unless there is evidence of a really serious crime or a court order that cannot be resisted—that people in Parliament have a privilege on behalf of the public and that matters to the public. It does not matter to me a great deal if I am arrested, but it matters a great deal that everybody in my constituency has confidence that they can come to me—be they a serving police officer, a civil servant, working in a bank or the health service, or unemployed—and say, "I think you and others should know about this. What should be done about it?" That is not being an alternative news service to the Government or the health authority; it is about people having the confidence to come to me, my predecessor or my successor, whoever they may be. It is about how this country works. It is not formal British constitutional theory; it is what should happen, and people should know that it happens.
	Someone asked me what I do in Parliament, and I said that I spend quite a lot of time trying to anticipate problems and giving people warnings about them. Two years ago, we revised the law on the health service and changed the system of public involvement in health. Community health councils had been abolished, and the system has been changed four or five times by the present Government. It is still not right, and I think it would have been better if we had kept CHCs, as has happened in Scotland and Wales. There are no particular problems there, and there would be none here.
	Another health service issue is the training of doctors and what this House allowed the Government to get away with in that sphere. Many doctors and some Members, including me, tried to tell Ministers that modernising medical careers, and the computerised application service, would have perverse results. Ministers said that everything would be all right, but we ended up with a system in which a clinical PhD in a relevant subject was worth less than 150 words written on leadership—which was probably downloaded from a website in any case. It was a disaster and remedial action was required, but we cannot yet be sure whether that has worked reasonably well.
	Several people warned of major problems with the NHS IT system, although some can be put right. In Worthing, our hospital was forced to have a system that meant that, up until two or three weeks ago, relatively simple things could not be done. A consultant could not, for example, transfer a patient to another consultant without wiping all the data and having to re-enter them. Lists of patients could not be printed for shift hand-overs three times a day by condition, by doctor or by bed—three simple requirements. It took a week's programming, and it took a year to get it agreed. Once it was agreed, it was at least done fast.
	We need a more reactive system. When people provide warnings, they should be heeded. When they suggest ways to help, they should be taken up fast. Our system should work through the interaction of the experience of MPs, Ministers, civil servants, administrators, computer experts and the like. We could reduce avoidable waste and increase well-being by making systems work. Legislation can help, but it is not always the answer.
	My wife would call my next point an example of my "me, lovely me" approach, but I recall starting a programme to cut road deaths, which has worked very well—although not well enough. They are down from 5,600 a year to under 3,000. Welcome progress has been made, including during the past 11 years. However, we could save three times that number a year through abdominal aortic aneurysm screening. If men—it is a male problem—were screened at 60, we would know who had a problem and who would be clear until they reached 75. That could save 7,000 unnecessary deaths a year. Ministers rightly reacted when they saw a demonstration from the Vascular Society, and the faster progress is made the better. We should have such screening within a year for everyone who qualifies and is willing to take it up.
	The Queen's Speech should have included the revision of freedom of information and data protection. If I were a diabetes doctor working in a hospital and seconded to a community education programme, funded by the primary care trust and subject to the NHS confidentiality agreement, I should be able to invite patients to it whom I thought would benefit—perhaps from a particular ethnic group—without being disciplined, sacked or referred to the General Medical Council for taking a list of names, addresses and telephone numbers and asking my secretary to ring those patients and invite them. That is the kind of disproportionality that gives data protection a bad name. I ask the health service, Ministers and all Departments, if they find examples of such disproportionate action, to send them to the Information Commissioner. We need more guidance on this, or a change in the law that would give people protection when they are trying to do something clearly in the public good but have made a technical slip. Such people should not be exposed to the worst kind of crisis.
	My final point relates to the marine and coastal access Bill. We established a basic right to roam through recent legislation but, because of a court decision perhaps a hundred years ago, we do not have a right to use rivers. We have a right to use inland waterways and canals, but I cannot take my canoe on some rivers without getting the agreement of every person with an interest in the land on either side of the bank from the beginning to the end of my journey. It is not an issue of how I gain access to the water, but of passing down the river. It is as if I could take my horse on to a bridleway only with the permission of the people who owned the land on either side of it. We would regard that as ludicrous, although my horse might disturb birds. We accept people using bridleways and footpaths, and we are likely to accept coastal access rights. We should therefore introduce the same rights to the use of rivers in England as exist in Scotland.
	I went to Scotland with the British Canoe Union and the Scottish Canoe Association and spoke about negotiating with landowners to obtain access to the water. Most canoeists are careful about spawning grounds in rivers and about anglers' interests. We could incorporate access rights in the Bill, and if there are anglers who think that that would lead to serious problems they should talk to Scottish anglers about their experiences. We need to get rid of that prohibition, which is relatively recent, and give people the rights that they should have.

Michael Clapham: I agree with the comments by the hon. Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) about Mr. Speaker, although on the economy I am nearer to the position of my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) than that of the hon. Gentleman. As we have moved from a Milton Friedman approach to Keynesianism, there are new opportunities. As we seek to build on the stabilisation of the financial sector, we need more investment. In making that investment, we need to think carefully about the technology and to relate it to larger projects. I am talking about carbon capture and storage. It is a pity that the Government have not moved as quickly as they could have done on carbon capture and storage.
	As my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who is sitting on the Front Bench, will know, the Government have already selected four projects that might become eligible for Government funding, but we will not choose the one company that we will fund until next autumn. That is much too late, because we have allowed others to get in front of us. The Chinese are already working on carbon capture and storage, as are the Americans and some Europeans. Our failure to move speedily—I believe that, had we had the will, we could have had a small carbon capture and storage unit running in 2003—means that we have lost the opportunity for exports. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the technology, because we require it for the future. We need to combine it with a grand scheme, and that is why I want the Under-Secretary to ask his colleague the Energy and Climate Change Minister to consider a project proposed by Yorkshire Forward.
	Yorkshire Forward has a plan to develop carbon capture and storage on a grand scale. The project would capture all the CO2 from the power stations in the region and from large industry and it would then be pumped out in a series of pipes to be stored in the oil wells in the North sea, which are the nearest oil wells to the Yorkshire coast. I understand that Yorkshire Forward has been refused Government aid, yet the project would create some 50,000 jobs. It would stimulate the steel industry and the engineering industry in Yorkshire, and would give great opportunities to new apprentices, offering the kind of apprenticeships that we want. In developing that technology and relating it to the project proposed by Yorkshire Forward, we could stimulate employment in the Yorkshire region. I hope that the Under-Secretary will urge the Energy and Climate Change Minister to consider the Yorkshire Forward project.
	A little earlier, we heard a good speech, which I did not agree with, from the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood). I thought that it was a passionate speech, even though I did not agree with the economic analysis. Nevertheless, what he had to say about small and medium-sized industries was correct. On Friday, I visited such an enterprise in my constituency. It was a print works—Print City, which employs some 50 workers. I was told by the management that there are difficulties with the banks, particularly in relation to overdrafts, but the company basically works for the banks. Most of its printing is for the banks; for example, it prints the forms that they use. The managers told me that the order book goes well into the future. Business is coming in from the banks, and the only thing not coming in is the credit from the banks to facilitate the company.
	Ensuring that the credit is available from the banks for small and medium-sized enterprises is important, and the Government must take up that issue. If they do not, small and medium-sized enterprises will close, and we have already been given examples from some constituencies. The hon. Member for Worthing, West referred to the closure of some factories in his constituency. We cannot afford that. Our economy has moved towards small and medium-sized enterprises; 60 per cent. of gross domestic product comes from such enterprises. It is essential, therefore, that we get an understanding from the banks that the credit must flow towards industry.
	Let me move to the issue of protecting the public. I refer my hon. Friend the Minister to recycling projects around the country. As we move towards greater recycling, we find that there is no process that has really been thought out. In my constituency, and in a number of constituencies represented by hon. Members from all parties, we see windrow composting, where green waste is set out on a concrete base in lines to rot in the open. It is turned from time to time, and as it is turned organic dusts—or bioaerosols—tend to be released. Those bioaerosols can be quite dangerous to communities that are near at hand.
	The Environment Agency sets a general rule that windrow composting should happen no less than 250 m from the nearest residential dwellings. Research that I have seen and that I have had carried out suggests that the distance between the composting process and the nearest dwelling needs to be far greater. In fact, the most up-to-date study that has been done, which was produced at Giessen university in Germany, suggests that the composting process should be at least 500 m from the nearest dwellings.
	That problem is not the only issue to do with composting. We need to move composting to a vessel-type system rather than leaving it in the open, where bioaerosols present a problem to nearby communities. We need DEFRA to ensure that in protecting the environment and the public, particularly in rural communities, it considers whether we should use a completely different process. I refer the Minister to a process that is considered safe: anaerobic digestion, which treats biodegradable organic waste in an enclosed vessel using bacteria in the absence of oxygen. The process breaks down the waste, generating usable products that include biogas, which can be burnt to produce energy, fibre for soil conditioning and a liquor that can be used in a liquid fertiliser. We would be recycling in a meaningful and productive way.
	Some of the windrow composting around the country to which I have been alerted produce a nauseating smell that, in some places, has caused the Environment Agency to intervene to close down the scheme. There is a danger that unless we grasp the issue, in two or three years' time we could engulf the country in a nauseating smell that comes from recycling. We must grasp the nettle now and we must ask the Environment Agency to work with the Health and Safety Executive to decide on a process—I suggest the anaerobic digestion process—that will ensure public safety.
	The Gracious Speech contains some very helpful proposals. One of them is the justice Bill, whose most important changes for my constituents will be the improvements to the coroner service and the process of death certification. The British Lung Foundation produced a report in 2007 entitled "An Unnatural Death", which highlighted the problem that deaths as a result of mesothelioma cancer caused by asbestos are referred to as unnatural.
	When a person dies in that way, there has to be a post-mortem investigation and a coroner's inquiry. Often, that means that uniformed police in marked cars turn up at the home of an elderly lady because the gentleman who also lived there has passed away as a result of mesothelioma, and such visits can cause great but unnecessary concern. However, although coroners in England, Wales and Northern Ireland respond to mesothelioma cases and unnatural deaths in the way that I have described, the system in Scotland is different. There, people whose medical records show that they suffered from mesothelioma cancer are not considered to have died unnatural deaths. The fact that their deaths are considered to be natural means that the procedures that have to be followed are different from those in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
	In a previous life, I worked as deputy head of compensation for the National Union of Mineworkers. The process that applied then was very similar to the one that we have now. When a person died whose disablement assessment showed that more than 50 per cent. of his disability was caused by pneumoconiosis, it was accepted that the pneumoconiosis would have contributed to his death. That meant that the usual procedure would have to be followed: a policeman would visit the family and a short investigation would take place, after which there would be a post mortem and the coroner's inquiry.
	However, the union had a relationship with the coroner's officer, who would telephone me when his office was alerted to a death through pneumoconiosis. He would tell me where the death had occurred and when the visit would take place so that I could arrange for the family to be told that they were going to be visited. If the people being visited were elderly parents, I would arrange for younger family members to be present. That helped enormously.
	The measures suggested by the BLF need to be implemented in the justice Bill. In that way, we could ensure that we have a coroner's procedure that follows best practice and is the same, without variation, right across the country—in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
	Finally, there is an important omission from the Gracious Speech, which proposes no legislation to overturn the Law Lords' decision of 17 October 2007 on pleural plaques. I know that the Secretary of State for Justice is conducting a public consultation exercise on pleural plaques, and that he will make an announcement when that is complete, but the Gracious Speech should have said that the Government were prepared to bring forward legislation to overturn the Law Lords' decision.
	It has been suggested that when the public consultation exercise ends we might get a proposal for a no-fault liability scheme. I believe that such a scheme would be detrimental because, before the Law Lords' decision of 17 October 2007, a person who went to court and won compensation for the development of pleural plaques as a result of exposure to asbestos would also receive notification that the liability issue had been decided. In other words, the question of liability was decided when the court made a decision about compensation.
	If a no-fault liability scheme is introduced and the Law Lords' decision is not overturned, the question of liability would not be decided for the men and women who receive compensation. Consequently, they would be able to start to deal with the question of liability only if their condition worsened into mesothelioma cancer. That might be 20 or 25 years after the original compensation claim was upheld, with the result that the relevant documentation needed to substantiate liability might no longer be available.
	That is why I believe that we need legislation to overturn the Law Lords' decision. I hope that the Minister who is listening to this debate will make the Department of Justice and the Secretary of State aware that we need legislation to overturn the Law Lords' decision, rather than a no-fault compensation scheme.

Elfyn Llwyd: It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham) in these debates. I do not want to appear patronising in the least, but he always makes a thoughtful and useful contribution. He is an expert in the matters that he raises, but he is also practical in what he says, and it is a great pleasure to listen to him.
	I do not propose to dwell overmuch on the so-called "Ashford One" matter, other than to say that three or four years ago I was visited by the good men and true of the Met's SO11 unit. I was not arrested, nor interviewed under caution, but the visit happened because the police alleged that I had documents about the Iraq war. I did not allow them to search my premises or interview my staff, and I said that I had nothing to tell them. The officers went away again, and that was it.
	The difference this time is quite marked: we talk about sledgehammers and nuts, but my goodness me—for all I know, the document about the Iraq war that the police said that I had could have been damaging to security if it had emerged into the public domain but, although this latest incident does not seem to have anything to do with security, the police still acted in the way that they did.
	The Met have been around for a while. Today, I was running along to make a small, amateur contribution to the BBC's "World at One" programme, and I was confronted by a police officer as I tried to cross from Parliament street to the House of Commons. He said, "I'm afraid you can't cross this way." When I asked why, he said that a cordon sanitaire had been set up. I showed him my pass and said, "I'm sorry, I've got six minutes to get to Millbank to do a piece on the "World at One"," to which he replied, "I'm sorry, you can't."
	I pointed to a lady and a young woman with a pram and asked the officer why they were able to walk through the restricted area. He said, "I'm sorry, sir, you can't." Next, a Minister appeared and the policeman tried to stop him too. I was so frustrated that, in the end, I made my feelings clear and the officer said, "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm going to have to take your name." At that, I gave him my card. What I am trying to say is that, if I am arrested tomorrow morning, I hope that someone will pay my bail, because things have not been so good in Wales recently.
	I do not know whether there is a souring of relationships or whatever. I am not anti-police. My late father was a police officer. My brother and my cousin are police officers. Everyone is police officer, apart from me. But there seems to be something going on, and I hope that I am wrong in saying that.
	The Gracious Speech has some good things about it, and hon. Members would expect me to say that there are some perhaps not quite so good things as well. I intervened on the Prime Minister about the credit guarantee issue. The response was that about £1 billion has been put in, exactly for that purpose. Last weekend, I visited a company in my constituency, and its representatives told me that one of the biggest problems that they now have is that the people who normally guarantee their credit are not prepared to do so. They named two large retailers that they supply. I will not name them in the Chamber, because I do not want to create a panic, but I was really panicked when I heard who they were.
	What we need is an accessible, easy system, underwritten by the Government, as is now happening in France, to ensure that the economy goes round and that companies can deliver their goods. The company I visited is in a bad position because 18 per cent. of its turnover is with Woolworths. If that is not bad enough, it has delivered £585,000-worth of goods recently to Woolworths, and because those good have been delivered, the proprietary interest has moved to Woolworths and the company is getting not a dime for all that work. It is an old family concern in my constituency. The managing directors—two brothers—are friends of mine. I am deeply concerned about them.
	We are talking about the Queen's Speech and financial stability. I hope that, when we get to look at more detailed Bills, we will consider how it can be that that small company, having produced £585,000-worth of goods and delivered them to F. W. Woolworth, is now told by the administrator, "Sorry, lads, you not getting a dime for it." At the same time, the administrator is doing his best to sell off the goods. He will undoubtedly sell them between now and Christmas, if not well before then.
	I am a lawyer; I do not use the phrase "legalised theft", because it does not make sense, but it does make one think, does it not? As soon as those goods are delivered, any hope of being paid seems to go completely out of the window. The only saving grace is that other goods are on their way, and the administrator has said that a discounted sum will be paid for them. That is one good thing. I am mindful of the fact that we have only just had an insolvency Bill, but do we need to think again about looking at the insolvency legislation to provide for that kind of situation, so that the administrator could pay perhaps not the whole £585,000 but a good chunk of that money to keep that company going and continuing to trade.
	I understand that there is a plan for Woolworths to trade until Christmas. I am just making a point about whether we need to look at that situation. I am not sure whether the American model of protection under chapter 11 or some sort of abridged version of it might help. I am no expert in that, but I hope that others who are more expert in the field who may read the report of the debate might be able to assist in due course.
	I hoped that the abolition of stamp duty would have been included in the Queen's Speech. That would have been one way to kick-start the economy. Stamp duty is a pernicious tax, and it has become more and more pernicious because it has not been uprated in the right manner, year on year, or Budget on Budget. Today, the Prime Minister mentioned the protection for those who face repossession, and I welcome that part of his speech very much indeed.
	Her Majesty the Queen referred in the Gracious Speech to her Government continuing to work closely with devolved Administrations. I am pleased to say that, on 8 September of this year, Ms Jocelyn Davies—the Plaid Cymru Housing Minister in Cardiff—announced a mortgage rescue plan. So we are ahead of the game on this one, albeit in a less dramatic fashion perhaps, not seeking to change the world, but we have taken steps in that regard before now. It is almost Christmas, and we have got this welcome announcement today.
	Another thing that I should have liked to see is some form of reining in of the energy companies. It is all very easy to say, "Let's have a windfall tax." It is almost a totem that we have got to say, "Windfall tax." I do not really disagree with that, but I will not propose it this evening. However, I should like greater powers to be given to Ofgem, so that it intervenes and is proactive, not reactive. I believe that we should reintroduce price controls on gas and electricity. Hon. Members will know of course that we had them until 2002, but in the guise of light-touch regulation of the market that new Labour has apparently embraced, we allow Ofgem to have a brief—

Elfyn Llwyd: The hon. Gentleman is quite right. It went earlier this week, so perhaps we can therefore see a swift reversal in the way that we deal with that regulator. Let us see. However, with such an important regulator, such a light-touch approach is not what is required.
	We also need to consider why people who use prepayment meters are being over-charged. They are the most vulnerable people in society, and we are unable to do anything about them. I hope that, somewhere during the next round of legislative proposals, we can really get to grips with that. Can we not abolish VAT on electricity and gas, at least for the time being—a simple point—bearing in mind that an attempt has been made, via £12.5 billion-worth of VAT, to spark the retail market? As the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) said, that is not going to work. It has not a chance of working when stores are discounting by 20 or 30 per cent. already. I would have thought that it would be far more effective if we were to alleviate the problem suffered by those people who are unable to afford to heat and light their premises. That must be our No. 1 priority in all this.
	Frankly, to be fair, the Government had to bail out the banks. I cannot see that anything would have remained if they had not done so; we would all have imploded if something had not been done. It might have been done earlier—we can argue about that—but it has been done; it has cost a lot of money; and we will have to pay for it at some future date. All that I understand, but I also understand that something had to be done. However, I believe that now is the time that we should look again at the way in which the banks work, bearing in mind that some of them are part-nationalised and others have been nationalised. We should tell them, "Look. We expect you to start lending to one another," in order to deal with the examples that we heard from the hon. Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) about firms and companies with good trading histories being denied assistance. That is absolutely appalling. Whether that is to do with the gearing of their assets to lending, as the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) said, or whatever the cause, we are all aware, as Members of Parliament, of many similar examples. I know of an example where a chap has an overdraft of about £50,000. He has never gone above £15,000, but the bank has said that it can still offer him £50,000, but it will charge him as though he had taken out £50,000. That is absolutely wrong. It is usury, to use a Biblical word. It is absolutely foul. We all know of such examples. We talk about trying to get the economy back on its feet, but the ability to borrow is fundamental. I know that the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon), who is a member of the Treasury Committee, and others know more about that issue than I do, but even I have noticed the problems. There should be some measure in the Gracious Speech—a responsible lending Bill—to get to grips with that. I do not know whether we need regulation or a Bill.
	We are now seeing an increase in door-to-door lenders and lending at massive interest rates. Only last week, during a debate, someone mentioned that an interest rate of 350 per cent. was being charged. I believe that charging such rates should be a criminal offence. It can be dealt with in the civil context. One can take the matter to a county court. If the interest rate is unconscionable, one has to prove it before a judge. Lawyers such as me can do that, but an individual who cannot afford a lawyer and will not get legal aid is expected to go along and argue that the rate that they agreed is unconscionable. That legal tool cannot be reasonably used. The only way forward is to criminalise such activities. I know that some people rely on that kind of credit, but heaven's above—to make someone pay 350 per cent. interest is appalling.
	I give another reason why we are in a pickle at the moment. I came across it when I spoke with an ex-regional director of one of the four big banks who told me that the various bank managers had targets that they had to meet on the number of mortgages that they gave out each month, or whatever it might be. He told me that, if I went to them saying that I would like a mortgage of, whatever the amount might be, and my accounts were not okay, nine out of 10 of those managers would say to me, "Go back, inflate your figures by 20 per cent., come back next week and I will give you the mortgage." In fine weather, that is lovely. The same goes for 120 per cent. mortgages on premises. But when it starts to rain, the roof leaks big time, to coin a phrase. That is such a common practice that that ex-regional director even referred to them as "liar loans". The bank manager ticked the box, the customer was happy during fine weather and everyone seemed to be happy about that rosy boom, or whatever we might call it. That is part of what has been going on and someone at some point will have to account for it.
	On the crime and policing issue, I do not see the need for elected police authorities, because there is a danger of politicising the police—if we have not reached that point already, given what was said earlier—and making that happen Britain-wide, rather than Met-wide. If the vast majority of those on police authorities are elected councillors, there is democratic accountability and transparency already, so I do not necessarily think that directly elected police authorities will take us much further.
	I appreciate the continued reference to eradicating child poverty by 2020. I am pleased that that target is in the Gracious Speech. I am also pleased that there will be a Bill to fight discrimination and to bring equality to the workplace. That is very good indeed.
	On training and apprenticeships, which I have been banging on about for years, let us see the detail, but I am sure that we can all say that that will be a good thing if it is properly done. One of the problems that we have had of late is the target to have 50 per cent. of young people at university while a good percentage of those young people have no commensurate jobs to go to. I know that it is a difficult political issue to discuss. Whenever anyone mentions it, people say, "Well, you went to university and you want to drag the old ladder up and to hell with everyone else." That is not the point. Is it wise to tempt youngsters into obtaining a degree that might not be all that useful in the workplace and then expect them to carry a £30,000 or £20,000 burden? They may end up stacking shelves in Tesco.
	It would be much better if we fostered the old idea again in our schools that vocational work is as good any day as work that one might obtain after going to university. Often, it pays better—think of plumbers and electricians, and good luck to them. We need to consider that option. However, we must have a properly structured apprenticeship scheme, so that people come out fully qualified and we do not have a six or nine-month affair that gives them one piece of paper that needs to be added to later, but which cannot happen because they cannot access further training. I am sure that all those points can be dealt with in due course.
	With the Gracious Speech, the old curate's egg comes in: there are some good parts and there are some not so good. I am slightly concerned about the reference to people moving from benefits. I hope that there will be greater support and choice for those people and that they may exercise some control. I also hope that they will be offered incentives; if there is to be a carrot and stick approach, I hope that the emphasis will be on the carrot, and not necessarily on the stick.
	Parts of the Gracious Speech are very good, parts of it are not so good. I give a broad welcome to several parts of the speech, and I look forward to seeing the detail of the Bills as they come through. It is a short Gracious Speech and it has to be said that there are some rehashed statements within it—things that we have heard announced before. That said, it contains some useful measures as well. We should all work together, especially on the economic front. As the right hon. Member for Wokingham said, at a time when there is a crisis—let us not beat about the bush, as it is a crisis—it behoves us to work together. The monopoly of wisdom is not always on the Government side of the Chamber.

David Taylor: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. As he knows, I admire his many admirable qualities, although his political judgment is not one of them. He said that if the Conservatives had been in power, none of this would have happened. We shall never know that. However, in an interesting speech, the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), one of the soothsayers and thinkers of the right of the Conservative party, was advancing the ideal of a derestricted mortgage market and lessening the controls. Is the hon. Gentleman attracted by that idea from his fellow thinker of the right?

David Amess: I am afraid that I do not accept what the hon. Gentleman says. For what it is worth, I was a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Department concerned when all those negotiations were going on, and my recollection of those decisions is completely different from his. However, I will not be tempted to go further down that road.
	Next, the Gracious Speech tells us:
	"A Bill will be brought forward to increase the effectiveness and public accountability of policing, to reduce crime and disorder and to enhance airport security."
	I get the impression that there is shock in all parts of the House about what has recently happened with a colleague's office being raided. Well, I am not shocked, because I have privately been in despair about what has been happening to our police force since 1997. We used to have the finest police force in the world. Now, thanks to Labour, we have a police force that is similar to many others throughout the world, and I greatly regret that. I have had a number of dealings with the police over all sorts of highly sensitive and serious matters, and I have found their behaviour, without question, to be absolutely unacceptable. I am in despair about what has happened. I will not go into detail about those matters, but merely point to one occasion when I happened to need the assistance of police officers. Two turned up, and their behaviour and response were an absolute disgrace.
	Because of the way this Government run things, we now have a Home Secretary who does not seem to be responsible for things and it is supposedly acceptable that she has not been told about them. Earlier today, I was chatting to two former Home Secretaries. The idea that they would not have been in the loop is absolutely crazy. Sir Ian Blair would not have lasted two minutes. Who is wagging the tail? This is the mother of Parliaments. This is where we make the law—it is not the other way round. The police are no longer accountable to anyone. I fully back the Independent Police Complaints Commission and its chief executive. It does a splendid job, but this Government have not given it the necessary power or teeth. My constituents have to go through so-called local resolution, which we have for the health service and for the police, and when they have done that and eventually get to the IPCC, it is like a war of attrition. The police never apologise for anything, and it is one law for them and another for us. In the light of what has happened to a colleague, this is a tragedy, and we cannot leave it like that. For once, Members from all political parties must unite to restore the sovereignty of this place. I listened carefully to what Mr. Speaker said earlier, and I think that we were all heartened by that measured statement. He said that he will look very carefully at the wording of the motion that the House debates on Monday.
	We have these organisations called police authorities, but I find over and again that if I take a problem to Essex police authority it seems to have no power to do anything, so what is point of them? It is interesting that the Government say that we are going to have yet another Bill, but it will be up to the incoming Conservative Government to restore the police service to what used to be the envy of the world.
	The next part of the Queen's Speech that I want to refer to says that the Government
	"is committed to ensuring everyone has a fair chance in life."
	We all agree with that. However, under Labour this has become a very unjust country in which to live.
	Then we are told that because
	"the health of the nation is vital to its success and well-being, a Bill will be brought forward to strengthen the National Health Service. The Bill would create a duty to take account of the new National Health Service Constitution that will set out the core principles of the Service and the rights and responsibilities of patients and staff. The Bill would also introduce measures to improve the quality of health care and public health."
	Yet if one looks at the detail of the Bill, a vital element—a clear statement of NHS values—has been completely left out. I served on the Health Committee for 10 years, and by the end of that time I found that we were going round in circles examining the same things that we did when I first joined it. The last thing that the health service wants is yet another reorganisation. Whether it is GP fundholding or independent hospitals, we are going round and round, and if anything would demoralise staff it would be further upheavals.
	Then we are told that the Government
	"will bring forward a Bill to reform education".
	We all welcome the appointment of a new independent examinations regulator, which the Conservative party suggested. It is important that that regulator upholds the integrity of the exams system, which regulation has so far failed to do. However, the rest of the Bill is full of meaningless things. It goes back to when Tony Blair was talking about "education, education, education" and being
	"tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime."
	I wish that this House had been able to take forward the motion, which some of us supported, to impeach Tony Blair. Of all the things that he has been responsible for, perhaps the biggest crime of all was the downright lie that he told the House of Commons about the war with Iraq. I look to my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mr. Baron) and say that I wish that I had had the guts that he showed, together with his 17 colleagues, in voting against the war with Iraq, for which I will never forgive Tony Blair.
	The Gracious Speech also tells us that the Government
	"will continue to take forward proposals on constitutional renewal, including"—
	this is the biggest joke of all—
	"strengthening the role of Parliament".
	Since they won in 1997, the Government have done everything possible to weaken Parliament. They have undermined the work of Members of Parliament and destroyed the basis on which this place operates. It is an absolute disgrace. They created that nightmare, but we are now told that they will strengthen Parliament's role. This morning, when I heard Lord Mandelson on the radio giving advice about a Member of Parliament's office being raided by the police, I did a double take. That noble Lord resigned from the Cabinet not once but twice, yet he now lectures us on dealing with a serious matter. He is the last person from whom I would take advice. It says it all if he is the cheerleader for Her Majesty's Government.
	The Gracious Speech contains one a measure I am pleased about—that to protect the environment for future generations. The speech reads:
	"A Bill will be introduced to manage marine resources and to create a new right of public access to the coastline."
	The marine Bill is important. It will protect marine species and habitats—a complex task, given the sheer size of the eco-systems involved. The terms of international maritime conventions have to be fulfilled and environmental management arrangements must be introduced. It has not been fully appreciated that Britain's seas are surprisingly crowded. The Bill needs to manage those pressures carefully, and it promises better opportunities for all stakeholders to help to shape the way in which our seas are managed. The question is whether their respective voices will be heard as the Bill works its way through Parliament.
	The Government are rotten and have failed deeply. They are running out of time and options. I hope that the Gracious Speech is the last that we hear from a Labour Government and that the incoming Conservative Government will be responsible for the next one.

David Evennett: No, the hon. Gentleman has just come in and I want to continue.
	The Government have done too little, too late about the economy. Of course, we welcome the proposed Bill to introduce a framework to protect bank depositors. The measure will allow the Bank of England and other authorities to intervene when a bank gets into severe difficulties, and that is welcome. We are also pleased that several banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, will not move on repossessions for six months. That will provide some help for some people.
	However, people are genuinely fearful that they will be out of a job or unable to meet their mortgage payments, yet they have been highly taxed by the Government, who wasted money and did not put any aside for the future and the bad times that have now arrived. They taxed and spent and did not look to the future and save, so that, when the recession came, they could do something with existing resources.
	The economy is the big issue. There are businesses in my constituency that are currently struggling. Some are fearful of the new year. We need action to help to improve their cash flow, reduce their taxes and cut their national insurance contributions. Thousands of businesses are threatened with going bust and thousands of people will lose their jobs. The 2.5 per cent. VAT reduction was not a sensible move to kick-start our economy, as will be proved in time. The Government need to do more, but I do not think that they have any idea of what to do.
	The second issue that I wish to highlight is crime and antisocial behaviour. It is interesting that the Government's policing and crime Bill concentrates on the accountability of the police through directly elected representatives on police authorities. That is another Conservative proposal. As I have said in the House before, my constituents want to be able to walk round the streets in their neighbourhoods and town centres without fear. Regrettably, there has recently been a considerable increase in burglary across my borough. Some people do not even feel safe in their own homes now. Constituents feel that the Government and the police do not devote enough time or manpower to the problem of burglary.
	There is also concern about the licensing situation and alcohol-induced crime. The Government liberalised the licensing laws. I very much regret the move to 24-hour drinking and believe that it has been a great mistake. The Government have looked at the issue again, but have still done nothing to address it—indeed, they have not even proposed anything. Around the Broadway square in Bexleyheath, there are three large-volume licensed premises that can contain up to 2,500 people on a Friday or Saturday night. Police data show that the area has been a hotspot for violence against the person offences and criminal damage. Between 2002 and 2006, alcohol-related disorder in the area rose by 43 per cent.
	Evidence showed that the incidence of alcohol-related crime, disorder and public nuisance in Bexleyheath town centre was increasing, despite the use of mechanisms outside the licensing regime, such as designating the area an alcohol control zone and a dispersal area. The Major of London has recognised the problems caused by alcohol in public places. He took immediate action on taking office to ban the consumption of alcohol on public transport in London, and he backed that up by putting more police on public transport.

Andrew Selous: There should certainly be no tolerance whatever of violence in schools. Schools should be places where the children of our country can go in complete safety and security to learn. That is what they are there for, and the idea of violence in schools is as abhorrent to me as I am sure it is to every Member.
	Moving from schools to skills, I was horrified to learn recently when the Government brought out their climate change report that the major constraint on building more nuclear power stations—regardless of our views on whether to do so is right or wrong—is that there is a shortage of suitably qualified engineers to build the nuclear power stations that we may need to keep the lights on and to keep us in business in this country. Sadly, in some parts of our country, engineering training is not all that it could be. Some local businesses have reported to me experiences that do not reflect well on the engineering training that certain of their employees have received. I also recently learned that in three major local education authorities—Blackpool, Darlington and Islington—not a single child took one of the three mainstream sciences at GCSE in 2007. I am shocked by that. Are we really saying that there are no children with any scientific ability in any of those three boroughs?
	If we are to diversify our economy—as thinking Members in all parts of the House realise we need to do in order to get away from our over-reliance on financial services, property and public spending—we need engineers for the future. We need people with a grounding in science so that if we require nuclear power stations in future so that we can keep warm and keep the lights on, we have skilled people who can enable us to provide that. We need to look urgently at our science base. People cannot go on to be more skilled engineers and scientists later on at A-level or university or in further study if they do not have the GCSE base. We must look into that.
	A number of my hon. Friends have commented on the Government's local economic development and democracy Bill, which was mentioned in the Queen's Speech. I view that Bill with a little incredulity given the experience of my constituents in recent years, who have had major decisions on housing growth, and especially the number of local jobs and the transport and infrastructure links that must go alongside that, taken out of their hands and appropriated either to regional bodies or back to Government Departments.
	I strongly echo the remarks of my hon. Friends the Members for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) and for Southend, West (Mr. Amess), who called for more powers and discretion to be given back to our local councillors. I am worried about the regional spatial strategy approach of the Government. If we are going to ask our constituents to go out to polling stations on wet Thursday afternoons to vote for local councillors, then those men and women who are duly elected by proper process, as we in this House are, need to have the power to take decisions locally, and also to be accountable for them so that if they muck up—if they are not building the houses an area requires or meeting the needs of the community—they can be voted out and a new lot of councillors can be allowed to try to do better. That is the basis of our democracy, and we undermine that locally at our peril. The value and worth of our democracy in this House is intimately linked to the value and worth of our democracy at the local level.
	I want to move on to another area that is not touched on in the Queen's Speech: family stability. This has some tangential relevance, because a child poverty Bill was announced in the Queen's Speech. I was pleased to hear that, not least because I am likely to be leading on it for the official Opposition. I very much look forward to that Bill. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition committed us to supporting it, because we, too, want child poverty to be eradicated.
	I mentioned family because, sadly, we know that a child whose parents separate is twice as likely to end up in poverty as a child whose parents stay together. Earlier this year, Mr. Justice Coleridge, a man with 37 years' experience of the family courts in this country, told the national conference of Resolution, the family lawyers' association, that he believed that restoring family stability and doing something about family breakdown needed to be at the top of the Government's agenda. His remarks were prescient, and Members of this House should listen to a man who has 37 years' experience of this country's family law system. The events involving baby P, which shocked all in this House, are a tragic reminder of what can go wrong when families break down in a truly shocking way.
	We learned today from a report in  The Lancet that 10 per cent. of children suffer some form of ill treatment every year in our society. That figure is far too high, and I want us to spend more time focusing on prevention, rather than on cure. There have rightly been cries for more inspections of social services and so on, but where is the focus, the vision and the determination from those on the Government Benches to give our constituents the skills and support to make a success of this area of their lives in the first place? Right relationships, responsible fatherhood and motherhood, healthy marriages and positive parenting are some of the most important things in people's lives, and we all pick up the pieces and pay for the consequences when those areas go wrong.
	I wish to pay tribute to Cambridgeshire county council—the neighbouring authority to the county of Bedfordshire, which I represent. Its "Vision For Cambridgeshire" has committed to reducing the amount of family breakdown in Cambridgeshire—that is doing something positive. I am in discussions with the new shadow Central Bedfordshire authority to see whether my local authority can commit to doing something similar.
	Although we do not have a Bill on this subject in the Queen's Speech, I want to discuss a slightly different area in the final part of my remarks. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime Minister what had happened to the Government's intention to do something about British values—I think he mentioned the British day and the Government's paper on Britishness. My right hon. Friend's questions were well put, because I am sometimes saddened by the lack of focus on what binds together our diverse country, which has people from many different backgrounds and races, and in many parts of which there are segregated communities. When the Queen arrived in Parliament today, we saw her ability to be a focus of unity for the whole country. My right hon. Friend has suggested a national citizen service as another thing that could help to bind us together. I say to Ministers that there needs to be more thinking about what draws us together, whatever our background and racial origin, and whatever part of the country we come from. We need to spend more time focusing on the things that unite us.
	In the closing minutes of my address, I wish gently to rebut some comments made by certain Ministers over the past year or so. They have said in various media interviews that Britain is a secular society. That is part of the whole debate about Britishness and British values, and I disagree that ours is a secular society. It is a very diverse society, made up of people who are secular and people of very great faith, and many people at various points in between. I do not want to live in a theocracy, but nor do I want to live in a secular society.
	I understand that in the last census, some 70 per cent. of people said that they were Christian. Some 1.7 million Anglicans visit church every Sunday, and Church membership is actually growing, as are other faith communities in our country. By contrast, the membership of the British Humanist Association is some 5,000 and that of the National Secular Society around 3,000. So when Ministers—and the chief executive of a Government agency whom I heard the other day—state confidently that we are a secular society, I would say that that does not tell the whole story. A political system with real plurality is surely based on the biblical injunction to love your neighbour as yourself.
	I shall give two examples of why I think Britain would be much worse off if we did become a secular society. I wonder whether hon. Members remember the mass of protestors who went to Edinburgh as part of the make poverty history campaign before the G8 summit there. We all received the postcards about that. It is not generally known that some three quarters of those who went were from Churches and faith communities up and down the country, and their disproportionate influence in that campaign should not be forgotten.
	I mentioned that sometimes some of my constituents literally have no food or money on a Friday evening, because the Jobcentre Plus office closed at 5 pm and they have not yet got their benefit. When that happens, I am so grateful that I have two Salvation Army centres—one in Dunstable and one in Leighton Buzzard—that I can ring and know that they will take food round so that that family can eat over the weekend until the Jobcentre Plus office opens on Monday. That is immeasurably important to me, and we should remember the work that such organisations and faith groups do on behalf of our constituents.

John Baron: First, may I say what a pleasure it is to follow the hon. Member for Aberdeen, South (Miss Begg) and to listen to her experiences? I agree that those companies that have embraced the equality agenda, especially as it affects disabled persons, stand a better chance of riding through this economic downturn than companies that have not.
	Being tail-end Charlie, I shall keep my comments brief. I know that everyone wants to move on to the next bit of business, but before I speak about the Queen's Speech I want to make a brief comment about the incident involving my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) and the developments of the past few days.
	I am sure that hon. Members in all parts of the House will agree that there has been a serious breach of protocol and a serious failure of the systems in this place. For the police to turn up without a search warrant, go into a Member's office and confiscate quite sensitive data is a clear breach of the public interest and our privilege in representing our constituents. My only comment is that I worry about the proposals for how we should examine what has gone wrong.
	The special Committee, for example, may sound like a good idea, but we already have a procedure in place, courtesy of the Standards and Privileges Committee, to look into such things. It has not yet been explained to me why we should go down the special Committee route when an existing Committee is ready to take on a job of that nature. I am somewhat concerned about the debate on Monday. It may sound like a good idea but, given that the Government will table the motion and that it appears this afternoon that we have been invited to suggest amendments, I worry that this will become a party political issue, rather than both sides coming together to try to find out exactly what went wrong.
	I now move on to the Queen's Speech. As with all such speeches, there were good and bad bits. What any objective observer would note is that a fair chunk of the good bits are Conservative ideas. Direct elections for police commissioners, or police accountability at least, the welfare reform package, the NHS constitution, the independent exam regulator or the points system for immigration—these are all ideas that have first found expression on the Conservative Benches. I very much welcome those ideas, because they are ours, but it is noticeable that, if the Queen's Speech and the proposed legislation for the coming year were stripped of them, there would not be much by way of good ideas.
	We are told that the Queen's Speech has been streamlined to allow Ministers to focus on the economy—and rightly so—but I suggest that some of the Government's claims about the economy are falling apart. We have heard much in recent years about how prudent the Prime Minister has been, yet we are entering this recession with the largest budget deficit in the developed world. We have heard much about stability, yet unemployment is rising more quickly here than in any other major economy. We have heard talk about how boom and bust has ended, yet we are forecast focus to have the worst recession in the developed world.
	My real concern is the extent of the debt that we are taking on. It is an interesting fact that the Government have now taken on more debt than all previous Governments combined. That must be worrying. It can only be unsustainable. When questioned about the tax-raising measures that have been introduced, the Government cannot deny that they have provided only a small element compared with the black hole that is being created in our public finances. The Government seem unwilling to come clean and explain where the money will come from to plug that black hole. It can only mean higher taxes further on down the road. That must be a worry for future generations, because if an economy is burdened with higher taxes, it will take longer to recover. That cannot be for the good of the country. I urge the Government to come clean about the extent of the tax increases that must follow from the amount of debt that we have taken on.
	I notice that there is a Banking Bill carry-over in the Queen's Speech. In many respects, that is welcome. The system of regulation that the Prime Minister, the then Chancellor, designed has failed. In 1997, he removed the power of the Bank of England to regulate the amount of debt in the economy and its responsibility for regulating the banks. A new tripartite system was established, but it was not clear from the start who was in charge. That became very evident in the latest crisis. There was the first run on a bank for probably 100 years.
	The fact that the special resolution regime has been embraced by the Government—that is a much better way of managing bank failures than repeatedly nationalising banks—is a tacit admission by the Government that the previous regime, set up by the current Prime Minister, failed in its primary purpose of maintaining a stable banking system. Therefore, that measure will be welcomed, but it corrects an error that was made previously.
	Members in all parts of the House have expressed concern that credit is still not flowing freely enough, particularly to our small and medium-sized enterprises and businesses. Too often in my constituency, small businesses are coming up against banks, in which we all now have a share, that are curtailing overdraft facilities and raising interest rates for the overdraft facility that remains. That is putting a real squeeze on smaller businesses in particular. In this place, we tend to underestimate the extent to which small businesses rely on overdraft facilities, particularly at this time of year. I urge the Government to take the opportunity provided by the Banking Bill to try to examine that problem. If they cannot do it here, they should do it elsewhere, but again I wish that I had heard about that in the Queen's Speech; there was nothing there about it.
	On the fiscal stimulus that the Prime Minister has talked much about, I would question the effectiveness of a 2.5 per cent. cut in VAT when prices in the high street are already falling by 20 or 30 per cent. That cut may not sound much—indeed it is not much when we consider small-ticket items—but it is costing the Treasury about £12 billion, which is an awful lot of money. It is the lion's share of the stimulus package.
	With that same amount of money, the basic rate of income tax could, I believe, have fallen by up to 4p in the pound. That would have really helped people in their pockets, particularly at the low end of the pay scale. Perhaps that would have been a better way to approach the matter. Then again, perhaps the Government were too concerned, worried and indeed scared about how attractive people might have found such a drop in income tax, even though it might have been only temporary. However, that would have helped hard-pressed families much more than a simple, very small cut in VAT, which will benefit only the well-off and the very wealthy in society who buy big-ticket items, and prices are already falling by up to 30 per cent. in the shops.
	I will mention the following point because I notice that the veterans Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones), is on the Front Bench. I am sure that he will have noted the developments in France with regard to the recognition of nuclear test veterans there. I am sure that he is following that with interest. I urge him to look at that decision in France carefully in order to help us to build on the excellent progress that we are making, which he has been very much part of, in furthering the cause of our own test veterans, who are now almost alone in not having their Government recognise their case. There can be little differentiation now between the French nuclear test veterans and our own. We have seen the Canadian Government, the American Government and the New Zealand Government all make positive moves. I welcome the new Minister to his post. Since he has arrived, we have made progress on the issue and I thank him for that again, but I also ask him to reflect on the French decision and hope that we can drive the agenda forward now.
	  Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned. — (Barbara Keeley.)
	 Debate to be resumed tomorrow.

David Wright: I am pleased to have secured this Adjournment debate on the first day of the Session on health services in Telford. If hon. Members listen to the tone of my voice, they will know that I could do with some health services, but I have loitered here for seven hours in order to make this speech, not knowing when the previous debate would conclude, because this issue is incredibly important to local people. Health services in my constituency are important, and the issue is exercising the minds of local health professionals and those who represent our community locally.
	I want to cover two points this evening. First, I want briefly to discuss improving primary care services. Secondly, I want to discuss in some detail the impact on my constituents of the new health and health care strategy for Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin, which is being developed by the clinical leaders forum in the area and which is being discussed by the NHS trusts and local stakeholders at the moment.
	We have an excellent range of primary health care providers in our town. Telford and Wrekin PCT will spend some £230 million of public money in 2008-09 on the NHS serving local people. Primary care services are important, and PCTs act as local leaders in determining what services communities need and how those services are commissioned. Our PCT has a good reputation locally for working in partnership with other agencies and delivering more through partnership than it could achieve alone.
	For many people, the GP is their first point of contact with the NHS, and we have seen significant investment in GP services in Telford in recent years. New practices have been built in Oakengates, Dawley and Lawley, and more than £3 million is being invested in 2008 to improve the 20 existing GP practices—there has been significant investment at Stirchley and Sutton Hill, for example. That money is rightly being targeted at some of the most deprived communities in my constituency.
	In passing, I pay tribute to those who work in the Shropdoc out-of-hours service. I am pleased that the PCT is looking to provide more services for local people with a new GP practice and health centre in Telford town centre, extended hours GP drop-in and pre-booked appointments, sexual clinics and screening, an onsite pharmacy, counselling services and a minor injuries and minor surgery unit. That is a positive step forward in primary care, but it needs to be developed in partnership with other GP practices. Facilities such as the Dawley practice should be expanded to meet local needs alongside that town centre development.
	We have seen the provision of more NHS dental services in the town in recent years. I particularly mention the facility at Stafford Park and the service at the Park Lane centre in Woodside, which is part of a major estate-regeneration process. That shows us putting together the jigsaw pieces of estate-based regeneration.
	Secondly, I want to discuss the development of the overarching health and health care strategy for Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin, which provides a framework for improving health and providing health services over the next five years until 2012-13 and sets out the vision for 2020 and beyond. That approach is part of the work by Lord Darzi to shape the vision of the NHS. The latest proposals have been developed by the clinical leaders forum, which was commissioned to look at the development of services in the county. Its strategic focus is on developing world-class services for maternity, new-born care and children's health, planned care, mental health, getting healthy and staying healthy, long-term conditions, acute care and end-of-life care. That body of health professionals is bound by two guiding principles in the development of the strategy—in fact, those principles have been established as part of the strategic process. The first is that any proposals that the body comes forward with for our area must make sense clinically, and the second is that they must make sense to the communities served. I shall return to those two points in a few moments.
	The clinical leaders forum has now produced a next-stage report that is being discussed by the primary care trusts and the local health scrutiny boards. The strategy does not focus only on hospital services, of course; a key focus in the report is the need to prevent disease and promote healthy lifestyles, and I welcome that. The report also looks at how we could provide services at home, or as close to home as possible. Again, that is welcome; the creation of hospital-at-home services makes sense, and I am pleased to note that the ambulance service, for example, is working hard right now to treat patients at first point of contact, therefore avoiding the need to admit so many people to A and E. However, we need to recognise that the A and E service in our county is often stretched to capacity and that many people still have to wait a long time to be seen.
	I also welcome the proposal in the strategy that minor surgery, out-patient appointments and many types of scans will take place increasingly in community settings rather than in acute hospitals. Having said all that, I recognise that the most controversial element of the report relates to a series of options for acute hospital services. In simple terms, the health bosses want to do two things. First, they want to keep children's assessment units at both the Princess Royal hospital in Telford and Wrekin and the Royal Shrewsbury hospital, but they want to put the in-patient children's service on one site. That, they say, is the safest option. They also want to develop a service to care for children in their own homes. As I have said, that would reduce admissions generally.
	Secondly, the bosses want to retain the A and E service on both sites, but with one dealing with the most seriously injured and ill—those involved in multiple-trauma road traffic accidents, for example. Level 1 A and E would be provided at regional centres, as it is now, and the two acute hospitals would have level 2 and level 3 A and E services respectively. At present, no decision has been made about which site should have which services. The clinical leaders forum has produced a long list of four clinical options for sustainable acute services. More work is to be done on those prior to public consultation on the recommended options in spring next year. The Minister will say that she cannot comment on the configuration until further work has been done, and in many senses I accept that. However, she will understand that I am using this debate to lay down a marker on my thoughts. I hope that the clinical leaders forum will think hard about what I have to say.
	The four options are for the medium term, and in my view we will ultimately have to examine the shape of services beyond 2020. I take the view that in the longer term we will have to look at the idea of developing a new emergency hospital situated between Telford and Shrewsbury and serving both. The Princess Royal and Royal Shrewsbury hospitals would be retained to deliver other services. I know that my proposal is controversial, but it would put to bed for ever the argument that rages in the county between the two towns.
	I have already said that it is important that we move to develop more community-based services, but we all know that there will be occasions when people need to use major hospital services. The history of hospital services in Shropshire includes a long struggle to get the status of Telford new town recognised as it grew from the 1960s onwards. The Royal Shrewsbury hospital continues to be the larger of the two acute hospitals in the county, despite the increase in Telford's population and its projected growth for the next couple of decades. The Princess Royal hospital was built in Telford after a long campaign and ever since then it seems that there has been a constant process of reviewing service delivery structures. To put it bluntly, I am pretty sick and tired of continual reviews of our local hospital services—a view that I am sure Telford residents would endorse and that local health service workers share. We seem to have the same discourse and discussions year after year, and it must be costing a fortune.
	I know from family experience how important Princess Royal hospital is to Telford people and to those from the east of the county. When I was a teenager, my grandfather spent nearly a year in hospital. He was a Shifnal man who spent most of his life as a chain maker. Princess Royal hospital had not been built in those days, and my mother travelled from Telford to Shifnal to pick up my grandmother every night so that they could go together to see my grandfather at the old Copthorne site at Shrewsbury. I used to go with them occasionally to visit him. If one factors in the return leg, that was a round trip of about 45 miles, night after night for a year. If there had been a hospital in Telford then, we would have benefited enormously as a family. We have come a long way since those days. The health service review does not threaten to take away the excellent hospital, Princess Royal, which serves my constituents, but I am going to fight to get the best deal that I can for local people, because I know how important that hospital is.
	For me, the argument is fairly simple. It relates to the second guiding principle that I laid out earlier: proposals for the local health service must make sense to the communities they serve. Telford is the largest population centre in the county, with approximately 133,000 residents; Shrewsbury has approximately 67,000 residents. Moreover, Telford is a growing town, and it is about time that the consultants and health managers recognised that fact. By 2026, at least 26,500 new homes will have been built in the borough of Telford and Wrekin, and that figure could expand to over 30,000 in the current review. Telford could easily grow to become a town of 200,000 people in the next two decades, and we need hospital services to reflect that fact.
	In Telford and Wrekin, 21.4 per cent. of the population live in areas classified within the most deprived areas of England, compared with 3 per cent. for the rest of Shropshire. In Telford and Wrekin, 24.5 per cent. of children aged naught to 15 live in deprivation, which is higher than the national average; in Shropshire, the figure is 13.2 per cent. Life expectancy is lower in Telford and Wrekin, and our public health indicators are worse than in the rest of the wider Shropshire area. Car ownership levels are also lower in Telford and Wrekin.
	That brings me to the effective catchment population figures for the two main acute hospitals. That information is on page 39 of the clinical leaders forum report, and it has been produced using drive-time data adjusted to reflect market share. Even if we include patients from Montgomeryshire, there are 224,838 people in the Princess Royal hospital catchment and 191,267 in the Royal Shrewsbury hospital catchment. Those of us from Telford want the county's main accident and emergency department to be located at Princess Royal, along with in-patient children's services.
	On all the social indicators, anyone can see the logic of structuring services around the Telford site. To put it bluntly, services should not be based on how the county looked 50 years ago or even 10 years ago—they should be based on how it looks now and how it is going to look. If that means moving services to focus on Telford, then so be it. This process is basically about what services are available for those of us who live in Telford and those of us in the east of the county. The issue is too important for us to get bogged down in political squabbling, because we all need to work together to get the best deal for Princess Royal hospital.
	Princess Royal hospital is not doomed, and we need to campaign in a positive manner—the people of Telford deserve nothing less. That is why, in the new year, I will launch an "I'm backing Telford hospital" petition campaign to show local health chiefs the importance of our local services. That will give my constituents the chance to show their support for the Princess Royal hospital and the staff who work there. As I said, Telford people deserve nothing less.

Dawn Primarolo: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. As my hon. Friend knows, an ageing population, heightened public expectations, new technologies and treatment and the changing profile of the disease burden place new demands on health services throughout the country. As he said, health services in Telford face particular pressures as the local population changes and expands.
	We expect the numbers living in Telford and Wrekin to rise by 17 per cent. by 2022, requiring more than 26,000 homes to be built and a decisive shift in local services to accommodate an ageing population. That is the debate currently happening in Telford. The county-wide strategy, developing health and healthcare, shows how the local NHS must evolve over the next five years to meet the new challenges.
	As my hon. Friend acknowledged, the recommendations take in the views of health care professionals, local authorities, community and voluntary organisations and patients, reflecting the broadest range of expertise and opinion. As he said, it contains plans to provide an increasing range of services in community settings, ensuring that people receive treatment, whenever possible and appropriate, close to their homes.
	The key themes in the strategy document, as in others being developed throughout the country, are sustainability, choice and quality. We are talking about taking a hard look at local services and exploring how we can future-proof them against changing local needs without compromising patient care, as my hon. Friend articulated so clearly.
	My hon. Friend raised concerns about the future of two hospitals serving Telford and Shrewsbury. The report says that the vast majority of health care services at the Royal Shrewsbury hospital and Princess Royal hospital can and should remain there in the medium term. However, the report also expresses concerns that the current model is unsustainable. There is a particular issue concerning the availability of specialist clinicians and, as the population changes, the risk that patient safety could be jeopardised.
	As my hon. Friend said, the report sets out four options, each of which examines how accident and emergency, maternity, neonatal, in-patient paediatrics and urology services could be provided to reduce patient risk and ensure the highest quality of service for local people. The focus of any future consultation will be about ensuring that care is provided as close to home as possible, with 24/7 access and appropriate support.
	Similarly, as my hon. Friend will know, we would expect any settlement for maternity and neonatal services to be in line with the Department's framework document "Maternity Matters", which makes it clear that maternity and neonatal care must be well co-ordinated and focused once again on patient safety and the highest standards of care. The point to stress is that the proposals are about specialisation and providing a better quality of service to patients.
	I know that my hon. Friend is particularly concerned about the A and E provision available to his constituents. I agree with him that it is paramount that there should be adequate coverage across Telford, Shrewsbury and Shropshire. I know that local health services are working closely with stakeholders, clinicians and the public to ensure that that is the case. I am sure that my hon. Friend would agree that although coverage is an important factor in A and E services, patient quality and safety are even more paramount. He and I want patients to get the right treatment as quickly as possible. Patient safety is always paramount.
	I understand that such issues are sensitive. It is therefore important to stress that the strategy document to which we are referring is by no means the final verdict. Rather, it looks at options. I want to be clear with my hon. Friend and his constituents: no decision has been made about the future direction of health services in Telford, and there are no current plans to close local A and E services. If the NHS organisations in Shropshire and the strategic health authority consider it appropriate to pursue one or more of the four options, a full impact assessment would be drawn up with costings, followed by further public and stakeholder engagement and an NHS consultation next spring.
	I know that my hon. Friend appreciates that we are a long way from any action being taken and that, in securing this debate, he recognises that there will be other opportunities for him and his constituents to influence the debate before any decisions are taken. Until we have a proposal in place for consideration, I hope that he will accept that none of us should jump to any hasty conclusions. I entirely understand his frustration in wanting to see the issues finally settled for the benefit of his constituents, following what he has described as a long and frustrating series of considerations. We have made it clear, in the next-stage review, that patient quality must be the driving force in a modern NHS. In Telford, as in the rest of the country, I expect any changes to support that guiding principle. They must be clinically led and focused squarely on the best outcomes for patients. I do not expect any changes to be made that will compromise the safety of my hon. Friend's constituents or the quality of care that they receive.
	My hon. Friend has put his case clearly today, and I know that he will put it again and again. He is quite right to do that on behalf of his constituents. Telford's health services will need to adapt to meet the region's changing needs, but any changes that are considered should, as I have said, improve the quality of treatment, not reduce it, and should have the full support of those whom they seek to serve. I know that he, in advancing his case, will use every opportunity to make sure that his constituents' voices are heard.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 House adjourned.